Martin Heidegger Quotes

...I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you. A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.

We name time when we say: every thing has its time. This means: everything which actually is, every being comes and goes at the right time and remains for a time during the time allotted to it. Every thing has its time.

Time is the explicable raw material of everything.

This was what it meant to be human, to know that time moved and all things changed.

Time is the life of the soul.

What was time itself but the bloom, the sheath enfolding experience? Within time, and with time alone, there was life - the gleam, the quiver, the heartbeat, the immeasurable joy and anguish of being.

We have this time to meet and do something, or just be together, and then we lose it and move to another kind of time, another kind of being, I guess. Those left behind must mourn, remember, and live on as we know.

Time is the element that controls the consciousness, the very being of the people.

If a thing moves, it lives.

My ideas about time all developed from the realization that if nothing were to change we could not say that time passes. Change is primary, time, if it exists at all, is something we deduce from it.

We say that time passes, time goes by, and time flows. Those are metaphors. We also think of time as a medium in which we exist.

We do not say: Being is, time is, but rather: there is Being and there is time.

The ostensible subject of my photographs may be motion, but the subtext is time. A dancer's movements illustrate the passage of time, giving it a substance, materiality, and space. In my photographs, time is stopped, a split second becomes an eternity, and an ephemeral moment is solid as sculpture.

I am; I was. I want to be.

Doesn't becoming imply time?

There is no man who is not, at each moment, what he has been and what he will be.

Reflect often upon the rapidity with which all existing things, or things coming into existence, sweep past us and are carried away.

There is no nature at an instant.

Time is the product of changing realities, beings, existences.

Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?

For a man can lose neither the past nor the future; for how can one take from him that which is not his? So remember these two points: first, that each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle, and that it signifies not whether a man shall look upon the same things for a hundred years or two hundred, or for an infinity of time; second, that the longest lived and the shortest lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.

Think about how rare it is that you exist at all. Also think about time this way: If something exists, even for a second, then forever in the future that thing “existed”, and forever in the past that thing “was going to exist”. So to even be conscious for a millisecond is a kind of immortality, but you have more than a millisecond. You have minutes. Hours. Months. A year? Years! This is a gift.

Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.

A dance to the music of time.

If the future and the past really exist, where are they?