Being and time determine each other reciprocally, but in such a manner that neither can the former – Being – be addressed as something temporal nor can the latter – time – be addressed as a being.
A boundary is not that at which something stops, but that from which something begins.
Dwelling is not primarily inhabiting but taking care of and creating that space within which something comes into its own and flourishes.
A person is neither a thing nor a process but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest.
Questioning is the piety of thought.
To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world’s sky.
Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals being as a whole.
I know that everything essential and great originated from the fact that the human being had a homeland and was rooted in tradition.
Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.
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.
Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.
The German language speaks Being, while all the others merely speak of Being.
How one encounters reality is a choice.
Being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with; its possibility is a proof for the latter.
The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being.
A man’s first bond is that which ties him into the national community.
Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.
From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition. Today’s literature is, for instance, largely destructive.
In order to remain silent Da-sein must have something to say.
The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control.