“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.

Human life very much resembles a game of chess: for, as in the latter, while a gamester is too attentive to secure himself very strongly on one side of the board, he is apt to leave an unguarded opening on the other, so doth it often happen in life.

To know and feel all this and not have the words to express it makes a human a grave of his own thoughts.

Let yourself go a little wild, a little rough around through the edges; the human spirit wasn’t meant for carefully-curated perfection.

The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world.

Religion is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize humankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it as I detest everything that is cruel.

If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won’t even be recognizable.

I can say with sincerity that I like cats. A cat is an animal which has more human feelings than almost any other.

Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself.