Was ist Metaphysik? Quotes

“The thoughtless habit of using the words “existence” and “exist” as designations for being is one more indication of our estrangement both from being and from a radical, forceful, and definite exegesis of being.”
― Martin Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik?

“Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?”
― Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics?

“Pure being and pure nothing are therefore the same.” This thesis of Hegel’s is quite right. Being and the nothing do belong together, but not because they are equally indeterminate and immediate, as in Hegel’s notion of thinking, but rather because being itself is essentially finite and shows up only in the transcendence of openness, held out into the nothing.”
― Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics?

“It is responsible for transcendence, selfhood, and freedom. Human openness can approach and gain access to beings only on the basis of the original revelation of the nothing. The essence of openness is to relate to beings (both those it is and those it is not), but it can do so only if openness is always already returning from the revealed nothing. Being-open means: being held out into the nothing.”
― Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics?

“Genuine boredom has not yet arrived if we are merely bored with this book or that movie, with this job or that idle moment. Genuine boredom occurs when one’s whole world is boring. Then abysmal boredom, like a muffling fog, drifts where it will in the depths of our open ness, sucking everything and everyone, and ourselves along with them, into a numbing sameness.”
― Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics?

“Since the essence of thought is to always think about something, thought would contradict its own essence if it thought about nothing.”
― Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics?

“WORKING OUT THE QUESTION OF the nothing must lead us to the point where either an answer becomes possible or the impossibility of an answer becomes clear.”
― Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics?

“The ideal of the sciences is to help us achieve an approximation to the essence of all things.”
― Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics?

“To demand exactness from historical studies is to violate the idea of rigor that is specific to the humanities.”
― Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics?

“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.”
― Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics?