Martin Heidegger Quotes

Take the best action toward your most important goal right now.

To have a major breakthrough in policy, you have to be able to stop and think.

It takes time and effort and preparation to think. Statesmen are far too busy making speeches to think.

Decisiveness is the best way to get things done.

It is a deplorable thing to see all men deliberating on means alone, and not on the end.

If I want to read something that's really giving me something serious and fundamental to think about, about the human condition, if you like, or what we're all doing here, or what's going on, then I'd rather read something by a scientist in the life sciences, like Richard Dawkins, for instance.

One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.

You do what you do. Or you do what you have to do. I don't know how to explain it better. I think that in the moment, you can't see connections, but sometimes afterwards you do.

Are you here to experience life or think about it?

Men must be decided on what they will not do, and then they are able to act with vigor in what they ought to do.

Existence is prior to essence.

Think hard before you begin, then enter the work.

I think the worst decision is usually no decision. If you make the wrong decision you can usually course-correct, but if you don't make it, you've already made it, and it's usually the bad one.

One sits down first; one thinks afterwards.

Each human being was given two possibilities: action and contemplation. Both lead to the same place.

I hope people will think very carefully about the future.

If you are going to try and change things, you had better have your wits about you.

I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity.

Action should be founded on contemplation, and those of us who act don't put enough time, don't give enough emphasis, to contemplation.

Action is an attempt to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory one. We call such a willfully induced alteration an exchange.

If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in so doing, you did not encounter new images.

The quality of our thinking will determine the quality of our future

Sometimes I do have something in my head. But, for me, I think it usually ends up being about considering all of the elements, and trying to understand the distance from where we are to where we want to go.

That delay is our surest protection which enables us to deliberate on the merits of our intentions.