Johann Georg Hamann Quotes
Our reason arises, at the very least, from this twofold lesson of sensuous revelations and human testimonies.
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.
Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.
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.
What good to me is the festive garment of freedom when I am in a slave's smock at home?
Thus the public use of reason and freedom is nothing but a dessert, a sumptuous dessert.
If only I was as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would have to do no more than repeat a single word three times.
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.
What Tarquin the Proud said in his garden with the poppy blooms was understood by the son but not by the messenger.
Everything is vain and tortures the spirit instead of calming and satisfying it.
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.
Nature is a book, a letter, a fairy tale (in the philosophical sense) or whatever you want to call 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.
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.
Lies, fables and romances must needs be probable, but not the truth and foundation of our faith.
The philosophers have always given truth a bill of divorce, by separating what nature has joined together and vice versa.
Self knowledge begins with the neighbor, the mirror, and just the same with true self-love; that goes from the mirror to the matter.
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.
Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves
Few authors understand themselves, and a proper reader must not only understand his author but also be able to see beyond him.