“For questioning is the piety of thought.”

—philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was born on this day, 1889

“Why is love beyond all measure of other human possibilities so rich and such a sweet burden for the one who has been struck by it? Because we change ourselves into that which we love, and yet remain ourselves. Then we would like to thank the beloved, but find nothing that would do it adequately. We can only be thankful to ourselves. Love transforms gratitude into faithfulness to ourselves and into an unconditional faith in the Other. Thus love steadily expands its most intimate secret. Closeness here is existence in the greatest distance from the other- the distance that allows nothing to dissolve – but rather presents the “thou” in the transparent, but “incomprehensible” revelation of the “just there”. That the presence of the other breaks into our own life – this is what no feeling can fully encompass. Human fate gives itself to human fate, and it is the task of pure love to keep this self-surrender as vital as on the first day.”

“‘Being’ means ‘appearing.’ Appearing is not something subsequent that sometimes happens to being. Being presences as appearing.”

“[M]any words—indeed, the essential words—are […] used up and abused.”

“The Greek thinkers already knew of this when they said: That which is earlier with regard to the arising that holds sway becomes manifest to us men only later. That which is primally early shows itself only ultimately to men.”

“Thinking cuts furrows into the soil of Being.”

“Perhaps, however, what we call feeling or mood [Stimmung], here and in similar instances, is more reasonable – that is, more intelligently perceptive – because more open to Being than all that reason which, having meanwhile become ratio, was misinterpreted as being rational….To be sure, the current thing-concept always fits each thing. Nevertheless, it does not lay hold of things as it is in its own being, but makes an assault upon it.”

“Those who idolize “facts” never notice that their idols only shine in a borrowed light.”

“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life – and only then will I be free to become myself.”

“The past of human existence as a whole is not a nothing, but that to which we always return when we have put down deep roots. But this return is not a passive acceptance of what has been, but its transmutation.”

“[What] is essential in all philosophical discourse is not found in the specific propositions of which it is composed but in that which, although unstated as such, is made evident through these propositions.”

David Bentley Hart writes:

“And Heidegger was a philosopher of twilight in a more crucial sense too. That is, he understood the vocation of every true thinker to be much the same as the vocation of the true poet, or of any true artist: to bear witness to that haunting and penumbral interval that marks the difference between being and beings, and to attempt to keep it open in our thoughts and our words and our works. He was himself in no sense a morally credible witness, admittedly, but he was an often perceptive one. And he knew that being’s mystery, while it is the source of our humanity, never shows itself to us with the undeniable clarity of a distinct thing among other things, but reveals itself only as a kind of intangible shadow at the edges of the things that are. Shadows, however, disappear as darkness falls, so those who can must continue to testify to that difference, to that mystery—because, if it is wholly forgotten, no one can imagine how deep and long the night may be.”