Johann Georg Hamann Quotes

The weakness of ourselves and of our reason makes us see flaws in beauties by making us consider everything piece by piece.

When I rest my feet my mind also ceases to function.

Indeed, if a chief question does remain: how is the power to think possible? - The power to think right and left, before and without, with and above experience? then it does not take a deduction to prove the genealogical priority of language.

Nature is a book, a letter, a fairy tale (in the philosophical sense) or whatever you want to call it.

Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves

What for others is style, for me is soul.

Everything is vain and tortures the spirit instead of calming and satisfying it.

Our reason arises, at the very least, from this twofold lesson of sensuous revelations and human testimonies.

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.

Everything the human being heard from the beginning, saw with its eyes, looked upon and touched with its hands was a living word; for God was the word.

The farther reason looks the greater is the haze in which it loses itself.

Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.

What good to me is the festive garment of freedom when I am in a slave's smock at home?

Self knowledge begins with the neighbor, the mirror, and just the same with true self-love; that goes from the mirror to the matter.

Few authors understand themselves, and a proper reader must not only understand his author but also be able to see beyond him.

I look upon logical proofs the way a well-bred girl looks upon a love letter

Thus the public use of reason and freedom is nothing but a dessert, a sumptuous dessert.

The product of paper and printed ink, that we commonly call the book, is one of the great visible mediators between spirit and time, and, reflecting zeitgeist, lasts as long as ore and stone.

The thirst for vengeance was the beautiful nature which Homer imitated

Lies, fables and romances must needs be probable, but not the truth and foundation of our faith.

If only I was as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would have to do no more than repeat a single word three times.

All human wisdom works and has worries and grief as reward.

Physics is nothing but the ABC's. Nature is an equation with an unknown, a Hebrew word which is written only with consonants to which reason has to add the dots.

Being, belief and reason are pure relations, which cannot be dealt with absolutely, and are not things but pure scholastic concepts, signs for understanding, not for worshipping, aids to awaken our attention, not to fetter it.

Every phenomenon of nature was a word, - the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible but all the more intimate union, participation and community of divine energies and ideas.

What Tarquin the Proud said in his garden with the poppy blooms was understood by the son but not by the messenger.

A writer who is in a hurry to be understood today or tomorrow runs the danger of being misunderstood the day after tomorrow.