If We Want To Lay Hold Of Being It Is Always As If We Were Reaching Into A Void. The Being That We Are

If we want to lay hold of Being it is always as if we were reaching into a void. The Being that we are asking about is almost like Nothing, and yet we are always trying to arm and guard ourselves against the presumption of saying that all beings are not. But Being remains undiscover-able, almost like Nothing, or in the end entirely so. The word "Being" is then finally just an empty word. It means nothing actual, tangible, real. Its meaning is an unreal vapor. So in the end Nietzsche is entirely right when he calls the "highest concepts" such as Being "the final wisp of evaporating reality"

Martin Heidegger, Plato's Sophist

System comes from the Greek συνίστημι, I put together, and this can mean two things. First, order things in such a way that not only is what is present and occurring distributed and preserved according to an already existent network of places for example, the way the windowpane is inserted into a completed windowframe--but order in such a way that the order itself is thereby first projected. But this projection, if it is genuine, is not only thrown over things, not only dumped on top of them. A genuine projection throws beings apart in such a way that they precisely now become visible in the unity of their inmost jointure for example the jointure which determines a living thing, a living being, σύστημα τοῦ σώματος; we still speak today of the nervous system, of the systems of digestion and procreation.

Martin Heidegger, Plato's Sophist

The finitude of philosophy consists not in the fact that it comes up against limits and cannot proceed further. It rather consists in this: in the singleness and simplicity of its central problematic, philosophy conceals a richness that again and again demands a renewed awakening.

Martin Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic

The word ‘substance’ (οὐσία) is applied, if not in more senses, still at least to four main objects; for both the essence (τί ἦν εἶναι) and the universal (καθόλου) and the genus (γένος) are thought to be the substance of each thing, and fourthly the substratum (ὑποκείμενον). Now the substratum is that of which everything else is predicated, while it is itself not predicated of anything else. And so we must first determine this; for that which underlies a thing primarily is thought to be in the truest sense its substance. And in one sense matter (ὕλη) is said to be of the nature of substratum, in another, shape (μορφή), and in a third, the compound of these. (By the matter I mean, for instance, the bronze, by the shape the pattern of its form, and by the compound of these the statue, the concrete whole.) Therefore if the form is prior to the matter and more real, it will be prior also to the compound of both, for the same reason.

Aristotle, Metaphysics

The unexpressed basis of traditional logic is a specific temporality which is oriented primarily to making-present, which is expressed in an extreme form in the formulation of the Greek concept of knowledge as θεωρία, pure intuiting. All the truth of such a logic is the truth of intuition, where intuition is understood as making-present. But should more radical temporal possibilities be found in the temporality of human existence, these would necessarily set an essential limit to traditional logic and ontology. Whether philosophical research can be intense enough and firm enough to make this limit a lived fact is a question that concerns the very fate of philosophy.

Martin Heidegger, Logic

A strong and great soul is altogether distinguished by two features. One is the contempt for the external things of this world. The great soul is persuaded that no man ought to wonder at, hope for, or seek after anything except those things related to goodness and virtue, and that he should succumb to neither another man, nor a disturbance of the spirit, nor a trial of Fortune. The second feature is that, when you have molded your soul with this sort of attitude, as I said above, you perform great achievements of the highest utility which are extremely arduous, laborious, and full of danger to life and to many other things related to one’s livelihood.

Marcus Tullius Cicero,  De Officiis