Quotes Tagged "heidegger"

Everyone is the other and no one is himself.

I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.

For Heidegger, boredom is a privileged fundamental mood because it leads us directly into the very problem complex of being and time.

The past of authentic history indeed was, but it is by no means over and done with. It is not done with because it is not done with us. And because we are the historical beings that we are, we are not done with it.

Death, in the human perspective, is not a given, it must be achieved. It is a task, one which we take up actively, one which becomes the source of our activity and mastery. Man dies, that is nothing. But man is, starting from his death. He ties himself tight to his death with a tie of which he is the judge. He makes his death; he makes himself mortal and in this way gives himself the power of a maker and gives to what he makes its meaning and its truth. The decision to be without being is possibility itself: the possibility of death.

Precisely because we have embarked on the great and long venture of demolishing a world that has grown old and of rebuilding it authentically anew, i.e. historically, we must know the tradition. We must know more—i.e. our knowledge must be stricter and more binding—than all the epochs before us, even the most revolutionary. Only the most radical historical knowledge can make us aware of our extraordinary tasks and preserve us from a new wave of mere restoration and uncreative imitation.