Ontological Inquiry Quotes

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

Arthur Young's Reflexive Universe - fascinating but too schematic to fit into my scheme. The most I could hope for was a sense of the vocabulary and some possible images.

As does every young man studying philosophy, I naturally asked myself questions about the truth of all this, and about the meaning of freedom, predestination, and liberty of choice and so on. But to have asked questions of yourself about it, I think is not too important. Let's say - I remain - I remained a believer.

Philosophy is tested and characterised by the way in which it appropriates its history.

Well, what I don't get is why do we exist? I don't mean how, but why.' I watched the fireflies of his thoughts orbit his head. He said, 'we exist because we exist. . .we could imagine all sorts of universes like this one, but this is the one that happened.

Metaphysics must be based on what exists, for it has the task of explicating it.

Reality, whether approached imaginatively or empirically, remains a surface, hermetic.

The Study of philosophy is not that we may know what men have thought, but what the truth of things is.

Being is the soul of every concept, of every judgment and of every reasoning.

Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle.

The object of knowledge is what exists and its function to know about reality.

The world is everything that is the case.

Philosophy is the science which considers truth.

To say what or where we came from has nothing to do with what or where we came from. We do not come from there any more, but only from each word that proceeds out of the mouth of the unnamed. And yet sometimes it is our only way of pointing to who we are.

Belief is nearly the whole of the universe whether based on truth or not.

Philosophy is man’s expression of curiosity about everything and his attempt to make sense of the world primarily through his intellect.

Dasein is a being that does not simply occur among other beings. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being. Thus it is constitutive of the being of Dasein to have, in its very being, a relation of being to this being.

The manner in which things exist and take place, constitutes what is called the nature of things; and a careful observation of the nature of things is the sole foundation of all truth.

We should be wondering tonight, "Is there a world?" But I could go and talk on 5, 10, 20 minutes about is there a world, because there is really no world, cause sometimes I'm walkin' on the ground and I see right through the ground. And there is no world. And you'll find out.

Thinking which displaces, or otherwise defines, the sacred has been called atheistic, and that philosophy which does not place it here or there, like a thing, but at the joining of things and words, will always be exposed to this reproach without ever being touched by it.

Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.

In philosophical anthropology, ... where the subject is man in his wholeness, the investigator cannot content himself, as in anthropology as an individual science, with considering man as another part of nature and with ignoring the fact that he, the investigator, is himself a man and experiences this humanity in his inner experience in a way that he simply cannot experience any part of nature.

I was excited to discover, in this tale by Eliade, the key themes that I most hope to understand better - time, consciousness and the dream-like basis of reality.

Philosophy fulfills the need to create for ourselves a single and complete concept of the world and of life.

No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.