Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger
Martin Heideggerwas a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition and philosophical hermeneutics. According to the IEP, he is "widely acknowledged to be one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th century." Heidegger is best known for his contributions to Phenomenology and Existentialism, though as the SEP cautions, "his thinking should be identified as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification."...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth26 September 1889
CountryGermany
Transcendence constitutes selfhood.
Being is only Being for Dasein
To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy.
The German language speaks Being, while all the others merely speak of Being.
Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.
The small are always dependent on the great; they are "small" precisely because they think they are independent. The great thinker is one who can hear what is greatest in the work of other "greats" and who can transform it in an original manner.
Only where leader and led together bind each other in one destiny ... does true order grow.
Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.
Body', 'soul', and 'spirit' may designate phenomenal domains which can be detached as themes for definite investigations; within certain limits their ontological indefiniteness may not be important. When, however, we come to the question of man's Being, this is not something we can simply compute by adding together those kinds of Being which body, soul, and spirit respectively possess--kinds of being whose nature has not as yet been determined. And even if we should attempt such an ontological procedure, some idea of the Being of the whole must be presupposed.
To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky.
How one encounters reality is a choice.
We do not "have" a body; rather, we "are" bodily.
Celebration... is self restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder - the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know all this.
Freedom is only to be found where there is burden to be shouldered. In creative achievements this burden always represents an imperative and a need that weighs heavily upon man’s mood, so that he comes to be in a mood of melancholy. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, whether we are clearly aware of the fact or not, whether we speak at length about it or not. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, but this is not to say that everyone in a melancholy mood is creative.