JOHANN GEORG HAMANN

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

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.

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.

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

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

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

If only I was as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would have to do no more than repeat a single word three times. Reason is language - Logos; I gnaw on this marrowbone and will gnaw myself to death over it. It is still always dark over these depths for me: I am still always awaiting an apocalyptic angel with a key to this abyss.

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

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.

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