Johann G. Hamann Quotes

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.

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

The thirst for vengeance was the beautiful nature which Homer imitated.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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