He who never says anything cannot keep silent at any given moment.
Even in expecting, one leaps away from the possible and gets a footing in the real. It is for its reality that what is expected is expected. By the very nature of expecting, the possible is drawn into the real, arising from it and returning to it.
In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting... Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are.
All questions that do justice to the subject are themselves bridges to their own answering.
Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought. Questioning is a knowing search for beings in their thatness and whatness.
Nature has no history.
What could be more alien to the “they”, lost in the manifold ‘world’ of its concern, than the Self which has been individualized down to itself in uncanniness and been thrown in the “nothing”?
All the poems of the poet who has entered into his poethood are poems of homecoming.
As soon as we are born, we are old enough to die.
Speaking a lot about something does not in the least guarantee that understanding is thus furthered. On the contrary, talking at great length about something covers things over and brings what is understood into an illusory clarity, that is, the unintelligibility of the trivial. But to keep silent does not mean to be mute... one who is mute still has the tendency to “speak.”... Authentic silence is possible only in genuine discourse. In order to be silent, Dasein must have something to say.
The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatuses of technology. The actual threat has already afflicted man in its essence. The rule of enframing threatens humanity with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.
The term ‘Being’ does not define that realm of entities which is uppermost when these are articulated conceptually according to genus and species: the ‘universality’ of Being ‘transcends’ any universality of genus.
Philosophy, then, is that thinkins with which one can start nothing and about which housemaids necessarily laugh. Such a definition of philosophy is not a mere joke but is something to think over. We shall fo well to remember occasionally that by our strolling we can fall into a well whereby we may not reach ground for quite some time.
In its factical existence, any particular Dasein either ‘has the time’ or ‘does not have it’. It either ‘takes time’ for something or ‘cannot allow any time for it’. Why does Dasein ‘take time’, and why can it ‘lose’ it? Where does it take time from? How is this time related to Dasein’s temporality?
Do we know ourselves – our “self”? How are we supposed to be ourselves if we are not our selves? And how can we be our selves without knowing who we are, such that we are certain of being the ones we are?
On this “way,” if to keep falling down and getting up can be called a way, it is always and only the same question of the “meaning of beyng” that is asked.
A resounding of the authentic word can arise only from silence.
The things for which we owe thanks are not things we have from ourselves. They are given to us. We receive many gifts, of many kinds. But the highest and really most lasting gift given to us is always our essential nature, with which we are gifted in such a way that we are what we are only through it. That is why we owe thanks for this endowment, first and unceasingly.
No historical movement can leap outside of history and start from scratch.
Certainly, “dialectic” is a magnificent thing. But one never finds the dialectic, as if it were a mill which exists somewhere and into which one empties whatever one chooses, or whose mechanism one could modify according to taste and need.