Hamann Quotes

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

She acknowledged each person's nearness to the dead and helped the group in its struggle for order-who grieved most, whose pain was most real-because in life there is always hierarchy, and it is frankly not profitable to remain modest and anonymous, not even at a funeral. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

Everything is vain and tortures the spirit instead of calming and satisfying it. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

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

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race. ~ Johann G. Hamann

The first time I saw you," I say, "I had a premonition. I had the feeling I'd found the thing I'd always been waiting for. The next time I saw you, it was the same. And every time after it's been the same. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

Lying is a full time occupation, even if you tell just one, because once you tell it, you're stuck with it. If you want to do it right, you have to visualize it, conjure the graphics, tone, and sequence of action, then relate it purposefully in the midst of seemingly spontaneous dialogue. The more actual the lie becomes to the listener, the more actual it becomes to the teller, which is scariest of all. Some people really get to believing their own lies. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

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. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

They were sorting, or classifying. It's easy-anyone dressed funny is the enemy, especially if they reject your supremacy or do not acknowledge school as entertainment. If the enemy tries to look like you and act like you, only in more affordable clothes, that person is still the enemy, only of a more contemptible, less terrifying variety- ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

I was an American girl; I possessed what our culture valued most-independance and blind courage. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

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

The farther reason looks the greater is the haze in which it loses itself. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

The sea slapped ominously, confessing its strategic impartiality. The sea is an international sea, and the sky a universal sky. Often we forget that. Often we think that what is verging upon us is ours alone. We forget that there are other sides entirely. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

When you stop looking forward to things, you get used to low expectations and you realise, what's the big deal about success anyway? If we're all to attain everything we've been conditioned to desire - wealth, fame, education, prestige, security - then those things will become so prevalent that they'll become meaningless. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

She knows how to keep him interested in a thousand ways. And her peculiarity, her singularity may not always be easy for him to bear. But surely she has never bored him. Elle sait se faire désirer, but without pretenses. It is her way, and he is under her spell like a lover, and happy when he can touch her lightly to remind her of something! ~ Brigitte Hamann

And loneliness. I should say something of loneliness. The panic, the sweeping hysteria that comes not when you are without others, but when you are without yourself, adrift. I should describe the filthy province of mind, the blighted district inside, the place so crowded you cannot raise the lids of your eyes. Your shoulders are drawn and your head has fallen and your chest is bruised by the constant assault of your heart. (p. 37) ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

Having to talk to people was the one thing, but soliciting conversation was something else. If I acted squirmy or didn't make eye contact, they would want to know what was wrong, and I would have to say, Nothing, since nothing really was wrong. Nothing is an easy thing to feel but a difficult thing to express ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

Hell is only loneliness, a place without play for the soul, a place without God. How could there be God in loneliness when God is presence? ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

I wondered what the value was, in the Darwinian sense, of making fast friends like that. There must be some scientific significance to being a follower, to allowing yourself to be persuaded by personality ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

Kate lost a mother," I said, "but I lost a nothing."
Kate doesn't feel that way," Jack assured me.
But what about everybody else besides Kate? How can I ever explain to anyone what she was when she and I had no name? People need names for everything. I wasn't a relative or a friend, I was just an object of her kindness."
He wiped my cheeks, saying Ssshh. I buried my face in his shoulder.
True kindness is stabilizing," I went on. "When you feel it and when you express it, it becomes the whole meaning of things. Like all there is to achieve. It's life, demystified. A place out of self, a network of simple pleasures, not a waltz, but like whirls within a waltz."
You're the one now," Jack said definitively. "That's why you met her. She had something she had to pass on." (p. 95) ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

When I rest my feet my mind also ceases to function. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

If you travel internationally, you will feel shocked by contemptuous talk of America. To hear your fellow citizens characterized as barbarians who know nothing of love, food, health, and religion, but everything of lawsuits, fast food, and guns, is to experience a national fidelity of which you may not have thought yourself capable. And yet, you're at a loss for a defense. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

The thirst for vengeance was the beautiful nature which Homer imitated. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

I wondered if Kate would harden as my mother had when she was young and her own mother died. Some people exist quite well in injury. It's like having gills to breathe underwater. Some people are clever about not drawing others into their affliction. You could hardly tell by looking at my mother that she was a stranger to providence. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

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. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

Why remain polite but powerless, in love but a beggar? ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

It was then that I began to write. Writing helps when you can't talk to your friends; it wasn't that my friends were untrustworthy, it's just that I would never discuss something that was hardly real as though it were really real. Often people do this, forcing friends into authenticating an imaginary life. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

It was strange to experience in one night the difference between wanting something you cannot have and having something you cannot want. I wished it wasn't my time to learn it. No one else seemed to be learning much of anything. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

If friendship is like a cathedral, then forsaken friendship is like roofless ruins... ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

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. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

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

Optimism is when you're not sure where life is going to take you, so naturally you anticipate the best possible outcome ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

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. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

When you lose your parents as a child, you are indoctrinated into a club, you re taken into life's severest confidence. You are undeceived. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

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

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

Sometimes you can't help but destroy the intricate things in life. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

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

Kant is sometimes considered to be an advocate of reason. Kant was in favor of science, it is argued. He emphasized the importance of rational consistency in ethics. He posited regulative principles of reason to guide our thinking, even our thinking about religion. And he resisted the ravings of Johann Hamann and the relativism of Johann Herder. Thus, the argument runs, Kant should be placed in the pantheon of Enlightenment greats. That is a mistake. The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality - or is it not? Is our rational faculty a cognitive function, taking its material form reality, understanding the significance of that material, and using that understanding to guide our actions in reality - or is it not? This is the question that divides philosophers into pro- and anti-reason camps, this is the question that divides the rational gnostics and the skeptics, and this was Kant's question in his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant was crystal clear about his answer. Reality - real, noumenal reality - is forever closed off to reason, and reason is limited to awareness and understanding of its own subjective products… Kant was the decisive break with the Enlightenment and the first major step toward postmodernism. Contrary to the Enlightenment account of reason, Kant held that the mind is not a response mechanism but a constitute mechanism. He held that the mind - and not reality - sets the terms for knowledge. And he held ~ Stephen R.C. Hicks

Sometimes a day is a symbolic day, and you behave symbolically. Sometimes you search inside for a feeling, and, finding none, you remember that no feeling is frequently the most possible feeling. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

All human wisdom works and has worries and grief as reward. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

Now that I'd experienced being a woman to a man I was in love with, I'd become self-conscious about being a woman to the world in general. Of course, being female is always indelicate and extreme, like operating heavy machinery. Every woman knows the feeling of being a stack of roving flesh. Sometimes all you've accomplished by the end of the day is to have maneuvered your body through space without grave incident. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

Nothing is an easy thing to feel but a difficult thing to express (pg 20). ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

Jocks were pretty much exempt from the standards that bound the rest of us. Teachers and administrators humor them because it's in everyone's interests to coax them through school and get them out of the building. Since it's unethical to turn them loose on society, they get sent to college to be kept out of the mix until their frontal lobes develop more fully. As enticement they are given sports scholarships that will later amount to nothing, not even good health. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

Say it ' he said the words caught at the base of his throat. 'No one.' 'No one ' I sad I swore 'but you.' I said it because it was true. There was no one but him and there never would be. I loved him with pain and with something greater than pain with a barren ache that pealed not in the heart but in the desert dry alongside it. I know it was so even then: if in his arms I was a woman beyond them I was nothing. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

It's better to keep grief inside. Grief inside works like bees or ants, building curious and perfect structures, complicating you. Grief outside means you want something from someone, and chances are good you won't get it. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

What is freedom when you're too beholden to act spontaneously ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

Getting lost just means not understanding. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

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. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

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. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

The families of graduating seniors emptied out of cars, sheepish in uncommon splendor, like milling clans at the origin of a parade. There is something spent about the families of teenagers; possibly it's the look of exhausted loyalties. Perhaps it's only right that we grow overbig in someone else's space. Perhaps we need to tire and differentiate, leave and adapt. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

Someone who knows she is beautiful, who is always told that she is beautiful, but who, deep down, does not feel very beautiful. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

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. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

What for others is style, for me is soul. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

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. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

[A translation into English of a poem Elisabeth wrote two weeks after her wedding]

Oh, had I but never left the path
That would have led me to freedom.
Oh, that on the broad avenues
Of vanity I had never strayed!

I have awakened in a dungeon,
With chains on my hands.
And my longing ever stronger-
And freedom! You, turned from me!

I have awakened from a rapture,
Which held my spirit captive,
And vainly do I curse this exchange,
In which I gambled away you -freedom!- away.

The Reluctant Empress, Chapter 2 ~ Brigitte Hamann

We are spontaneous when we are at our genuine best. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

But in fact there are infinite subtleties to identity-that is to say, there is the way that you are, which is the sum of the way you are becoming and the way you have been, which does not take into account the way you secretly wish to be. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

I look upon logical proofs the way a well-bred girl looks upon a love letter ~ Johann Georg Hamann

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. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

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. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

I could never settle for anything less than a renegade and a runaway, a descendant of greatness capable of voluntary disinheritance. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

People with motorcycles always assume that everyone without one wants a ride. I didn't want to offend him, so I said sure. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

It was frankly sort of confusing, the way everyone stared at our bodies exactly as they tried to erase the ideas of our bodies from our minds. We were supposed to get over ourselves but no one was supposed to get over us. The female body was our worst handicap and our best advantage
the surest means to success, the surest course to failure. (p. 72) ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

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

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. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

I look upon the finest logical demonstration the way a sensible girl regards a love letter. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

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