Johann Georg Hamann Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

Without language we would have no reason, without reason no religion, and without these three essential aspects of our nature, neither mind nor bond of society.

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

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

If only I was as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would have to do no more than repeat a single word three times. Reason is language - Logos; I gnaw on this marrowbone and will gnaw myself to death over it. It is still always dark over these depths for me: I am still always awaiting an apocalyptic angel with a key to this abyss.

The thirst for vengeance was the beautiful nature which Homer imitated

A thirsty ambition for truth and virtue, and a frenzy to conquer all lies and vices which are not recognized as such nor desire to be; herein consists the heroic spirit of the philosopher.

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

What for others is style, for me is soul.

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

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

The philosophers have always given truth a bill of divorce, by separating what nature has joined together and vice versa.

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

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.

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