Johann Georg Hamann Quotes

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.

Poetry is mother-tongue of the human race; as gardening is older than agriculture; painting than writing; song than declamation; parables, - than deductions; barter, - than trade.

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

What for others is style, for me is soul.

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 thirst for vengeance was the beautiful nature which Homer imitated.

Do nothing or everything; the mediocre, the moderate, is repellent to me; I prefer an extreme.

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.

I look upon the finest logical demonstration the way a sensible girl regards a love letter.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Faith is not the work of reason, and therefore cannot succumb to its attack, because faith arises just as little from reason as tasting and seeing do.

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.

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

What one believes does not, therefore, have to be proved, and a proposition can be ever so incontrovertibly proven without on that account being believed.

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.

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

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

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

We are not lacking in ovservation by which the relation of language to its variable usage can be determined rather precisely. Insight into this relation and the art of applying it belongs to the spirit of the law and the secrete of governing. It is just this relation which makes classical writers. The trouble caused by confounding languages and the blind fatih in certain signs and formulas are at times coup d'état which have them in the kingdong of truth than the most powerful, freshly exhumed word-radical or the unending geealogy of a concept; coup d'état which would never enter the head of a scholarly blatherer and an eloquent journeyman, not even in his most propitious dreams.

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.