Michael Watts > Quotes

“We are like plants which – whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not, must with our roots rise out of the earth in order to bloom in the ether and to bear fruit.”
― Michael Watts, Heidegger: An Essential Guide For Complete Beginners

“Indeed, in 1933 he refused to leave Freiburg to teach in Berlin, explaining that his ‘philosophical work ... belongs right in the midst of the peasants’ work’.”
― Michael Watts, Heidegger: An Essential Guide For Complete Beginners

“To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world’s sky.”
― Michael Watts, Heidegger: An Essential Guide For Complete Beginners

“rooted in ‘the forgetting of Being’.”
― Michael Watts, Heidegger: An Essential Guide For Complete Beginners

“Enframing describes our narrow, restricted understanding of ourselves and all things in existence in terms of ‘resources’ to be organized, enhanced and exploited efficiently.”
― Michael Watts, Heidegger: An Essential Guide For Complete Beginners

“In 1909 he left the high school to become a Jesuit novice, at the Society of Jesus in Tisis, Austria, only to leave a couple of weeks later as a result of severe chest pains that were attributed to heart trouble.”
― Michael Watts, Heidegger: An Essential Guide For Complete Beginners

“In fallenness one drifts along with the fads and trends of the crowd, caught up in the mindless busy-ness, and tranquillized by the secure feeling that everyone else is doing the same thing; things in general seem to have been worked out by us. Heidegger says that, in its fallenness, Dasein ‘becomes blind to all its possibilities, and tranquillizes itself with that which is merely “actual”‘. In its simplest form, fallenness is the non-awareness of what it means to be.”
― Michael Watts, Heidegger: An Essential Guide For Complete Beginners

“Death opens up the question of Being ... It is the shrine of Nothing and the shelter of Being.”
― Michael Watts, Heidegger: An Essential Guide For Complete Beginners

“Mrs Husserl was reported on occasion to have introduced Heidegger to others as her husband’s ‘phenomenological child’.”
― Michael Watts, Heidegger: An Essential Guide For Complete Beginners

“…it would be accurate to say that despair is the most precious sickness known to man, and so there is no reason to despair…if you are suffering from ‘existential despair’, since this is potentially your ‘ticket’ to freedom.”
― Michael Watts, Kierkegaard