“The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being.”

Understanding of being is itself a determination of being of Da-sein.

Let himself be drawn hither by the coercion of the phenomena themselves.

Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.

Poetically dwells man upon this earth.

As soon as we are born, we are old enough to die.

The thinker only responded to what addressed itself to him.

We are too late for the gods and too early for Being.

Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells.

The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as a picture.

Overman is the man who grounds Being anew-in the rigor of knowledge and in the grand style of creation.

Thinking only begins at the point where we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thinking.

The divinity of the gods must first eventuate before a god appears and before the naming word, which names “the gods”, can be heard.

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

When I spoke of “beauty”, I was thinking of Rilke’s notion that the beautiful is nothing but the beginning of the terrible, and of Hölderlin’s idea that the beautiful can unite extreme opposites in intimacy.

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

When we say something about something, we make it lie there before us, which means at the same time to make it appear.

Perhaps that’s what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?

You don’t know who is important to you until you actually lose them.

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.

Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life.

I have a great appreciation for our world’s history. I learn from my own mistakes, I learn from the mistakes we’ve made as a human race.

After all is said and done, more is said than done.

Society’s future will depend on a continuous improvement program for the human character. And what will that future bring? I do not know, but it will be exciting.

Knowledge is fundamental to all human achievements and progress.