QuoteProject
To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy.
Martin Heidegger
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

The quote suggests that being a poet during difficult times involves acknowledging and celebrating the beauty and transcendence in life despite adversity.

Martin Heidegger highlights the role of the poet as a vital observer and interpreter of the human experience, especially in challenging times. In periods of hardship, the poet's duty is to seek out and express the deeper spiritual truths that can often be overlooked. By 'singing' about the 'fugitive gods', the poet illuminates the sacred aspects of life that endure, providing hope and inspiration to others in a seemingly dark world.

Themes

PoetryAdversitySpiritualityBeautyHope

In practice

Example use cases

During a writing workshop, a teacher might reference this quote to inspire students to find beauty in their struggles.

More from Martin Heidegger

Dwelling is not primarily inhabiting but taking care of and creating that space within which something comes into its own and flourishes.
Martin HeideggerRead
Celebration... is self restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder - the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know all this.
Martin HeideggerRead
Transcendence constitutes selfhood.
Martin HeideggerRead
So long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain held fast in the will to master it.
Martin HeideggerRead
Everyone is the other and no one is himself.
Martin HeideggerRead
The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.
Martin HeideggerRead

Similar quotes

The strange dilemma of the 'ethnic-fiction' writer is that you are supposed to carry a banner for your homeland, be a voice for it, and educate the rest of the world about it, but I think that's far too onerous a burden for any writer to bear.
Khaled HosseiniRead
Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.
William Butler YeatsRead
The eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature. It should feel caressed and soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift. One moment, there will be nothing to look at and the next second the canvas seems to refill, to be crowded with visual events.
Bridget RileyRead
The newspaper is, in fact, very bad for one's prose style. That's why I gravitated towards feature stories where you get a little more leeway in the writing style.
Tom WolfeRead
The ultimate pleasure of architecture lies in the most forbidden parts of the architectural act, where limits are perverted and prohibitions are transgressed.
Bernard TschumiRead
From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,_x000D_ A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room_x000D_ And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up_x000D_ From your book, saw it the moment it landed. That's all_x000D_ There was to it.
Mark StrandRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.

Quote by Martin Heidegger | QuoteProject