Famous Martin Heidegger Quotes Explained
Martin Heidegger was a 20th-century German philosopher whose 1927 work Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) is one of the most influential texts of contemporary continental philosophy. Heidegger's <em>Being and Time</em> (1927) and his later writings on language, technology, and dwelling are the source of these most-quoted lines. Below are eight, with notes on each.
“Language is the house of Being.”
Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins.
What it means
Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins — from the "Letter on Humanism" (1946). Heidegger's slogan: language is not a tool that humans use but the medium in which Being shows itself; thinkers and poets are the "guardians" of this dwelling, not its inventors. The line is the most quoted statement of his later philosophy of language.
Attributed to Martin Heidegger:
“We never come to thoughts. They come to us.”
What it means
From What is Called Thinking? (1954). Heidegger reverses the usual picture of cognition: thoughts are not produced by thinkers acting on the world but received by thinkers attending to it. The doctrine grounds his account of authentic thinking as a kind of listening.
Attributed to Martin Heidegger:
“Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought.”
What it means
From What is Called Thinking? (1954). Heidegger distinguishes calculative reasoning (ratio) from meditative thinking (Denken); the former, when treated as the only kind of thinking, actively blocks the latter. The opposition is the central claim of his post-war lectures.
“Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being.”
Letter on Humanism (1947)
What it means
From the "Letter on Humanism" (1946). Heidegger redescribes the human relation to Being: not domination but vigilant attention. The shepherd image preserves dignity (the shepherd matters) without sovereignty (the shepherd does not own the flock).
Attributed to Martin Heidegger:
“Why are there beings at all, instead of nothing?”
What it means
Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts? — the opening question of Introduction to Metaphysics (1953) and of "What is Metaphysics?" (1929). Heidegger inherits the question from Leibniz and treats it as the fundamental question of philosophy: any answer presupposes a prior understanding of what Being is.
“The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”
Das Bedenklichste in unserer bedenklichen Zeit ist, dass wir noch nicht denken.
What it means
From the lecture What is Called Thinking? (1951–52). Heidegger's diagnosis of modernity: the proliferation of information and the dominance of calculation produce the illusion that we are thinking, while the kind of thinking that attends to Being has actually disappeared.
Attributed to Martin Heidegger:
“Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.”
What it means
Attributed to Heidegger and consistent with the argument of Being and Time, §27, on the anonymous "they" (das Man). Heidegger's view is that humans are originally absorbed in social conformity and only become individuals through the confrontation with their own death.
Attributed to Martin Heidegger:
“Being-toward-death is essentially anxiety.”
What it means
From Being and Time, §53. Anxiety (Angst) is the mood in which the inauthentic absorption in everyday life is interrupted by the recognition of one's own finitude; being-toward-death is therefore not morbid but constitutive of authentic existence.