Johann Georg Hamann Quotations

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

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

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.

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

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.

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

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

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

The thirst for vengeance was the beautiful nature which Homer imitated

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

What for others is style, for me is soul.

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