Quotes About Existence

Thought has the gift of thinking back, a gift given because we incline toward it

Nothing religious is ever destroyed by logic; it is destroyed only by the gods' withdrawal.

Expelled from the truth of Being, man everywhere circles around himself as the animal rationale.

Echte Erinnerung ist Zuwendung zum unerschlossenen Inwendigen des Gewesenen. Echtes Erinnern ist ein Ahnen.

If God, as the supra-sensory ground and goal, of all reality, is dead; if the supra-sensory world of the Ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory, and above it, its vitalizing and up-building power, then nothing more remains to which Man can cling, and by which he can orient himself.

the wonder that this world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know all this.

La conciencia habla única y constantemente en la modalidad del silencio. (§ 56)

Es kann sein, daß wir eines Tages aus unserer Alltäglichkeit herausrücken und in die Macht der Dichtung einrücken müssen, daß wir nie mehr so in die Alltäglichkeit zurückkehren, wie wir sie verlassen haben.

Every valuing, even when it values positively, is a subjectivizing. It does not let beings: be. Rather, valuing lets being: be valid – solely as the objects of its doing.

En tanto el tiempo es en cada caso mío, existen muchos tiempos. El tiempo carece de sentido; el tiempo es temporal

To say philosophy originates in wonder means philosophy is wondrous in its essence and becomes more wondrous the more it becomes what it really is.

Man obviously is a being. As such he belongs to the totality of Being—just like the stone, the tree, or the eagle. But man's distinctive feature lies in this, that he, as the being who thinks, is open to Being, face to face with Being; thus man remains referred to Being and so answers to it. Man is essentially this relationship of responding to Being, and he is only this.

Questioning is the piety of thought

Das Dasein ist je in seinem faktischen Sein wie und 'was' es schon war. Ob ausdrücklich oder nicht, ist es seine Vergangenheit.

The god wholly other than past ones and especially other than the Christian one.

Folks whose noses will still smell the day after tomorrow, and who still have on their tongues the day before yesterday, behave like ones who had known and configured the "new actuality.

For words and language are not wrappings in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and speak. It is in words and language that things first come into being and are.

El ente existente "se" tiene a la vista tan sólo en la medida en que se ha hecho cooriginariamente transparente en su estar en medio del mundo y en el coestar con los otros, como momentos constitutivos de su existencia. A la inversa, la falta de transparencia del Dasein no proviene primaria ni únicamente de autoilusiones "egocéntricas", sino también del desconocimiento del mundo. (Ser y tiempo - 1927)

Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing […], i.e., of truth.

Ein Zeug »ist« strenggenommen nie. Zum Sein von Zeug gehört je immer ein Zeugganzes, darin es dieses Zeug sein kann, das es ist. Zeug ist wesenhaft »etwas, um zu..«.

The question of existence never gets straightened out except through existing itself.

It is phenomenologically absurd to speak of the phenomenon as if it were something behind which there would be something else of which it would be a phenomenon in the sense of the appearance which represents and expresses [this something else]. A phenomenon is nothing behind which there would be something else. More accurately stated, one cannot ask for something behind the phenomenon at all, since what the phenomenon gives is precisely that something in itself.

The truth of beyng is the beyng of truth—said in this way, it sounds like an artificial and forced reversal and, at most, like a seduction to a dialectical game. In fact, this reversal is merely a fleeting and external sign of the turning which essentially occurs in beyng itself and which casts light on what might be meant here by "decision.

Only by existing on the basis of metaphysics can science renew and fulfill its essential task, which is not to amass and classify bits of knowledge but to disclose, in ever fresh ways, the whole realm of truth in both nature and history.