Martin Heidegger Quotes

We are actually fourth dimensional beings in a third dimensional body inhabiting a second dimensional world!

The ancient saying, "There is nothing in the intellect which was not first in some way in the senses," and senses being explorers of the world, opens the way to knowledge.

Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.

The world being illusive, one must be deluded in some way if one is to triumph in it.

Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.

We can speak very much to the purpose and yet in such a way that the whole world cries out in contradiction: namely, when we are not speaking to the whole world.

To understand is to experience harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance - and the body is our anchorage in the world.

There were two ways of looking at the world, but only one when you are starving.

Such is the world. Understand it, despise it, love it; cheerfully hold on thy way through it, with thy eye on highest loadstars!

Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.

Apart from the body does the world exist? Has anyone seen the world without the body?

And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.

Refine your senses a little more each day; stretch them...your awareness will pierce deeply into your body and into the world.

Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.

Consciousness ... is the phenomenon whereby the universe's very existence is made known.

Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be.

Changing how we see images is clearly one way to change the world.

Heidegger makes the distinction between being absorbed in the way things are in the world and being aware that things are in the world. And if you do the latter, you're not so worried about the everyday trivialities of life, for example, petty concerns about secrecy or privacy.

The world is such-and-such or so-and-so only because we tell ourselves that that is the way it is.

The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.

The world is a funny paper read backwards. And that way it isn't so funny.

There's nothing wrong with the world. What's wrong is our way of looking at it.

The body is our general medium for having a world.

The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.

The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art.