Johann Georg Hamann Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

What is this reason, with its universality, infallibility, exuberant certainty and obviousness? An ens rationis, a stuffed dummy which the howling superstition of our unreason endows with divine attributes.

While we are aiming at clear ideas, the food gets cold and tasteless.

Everything that man in the beginning heard, saw with his eyes, contemplated, and felt with his hands, was a living word. For God was the Word. With this Word in his mouth and in his heart, the origin of language was as natural, as near and easy, as child's play.

Poetry is the mother tongue of the human race, as the garden is older than the ploughed field; painting, than writing; song, than declamation; parables, than logical deduction; barter, than commerce. A deeper sleep was the repose of our most distant ancestors, and their movement was a frenzied dance. Seven days they would sit in the silence of thought or wonder; -- and would open their mouths -- to winged sentences.

Finally it is, by the way, obvious that if mathematics can arrogate to itself the privilege of the nobility because of its universal and necessary reliability, then even human reason itself would be inferior to the unfailing and infallible instinct of insects.

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

Not only is the whole faculty of thought dependent on language, but language is also the center of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.

What is sublime in Caesar’s style is its carelessness.

The true genius knows only his dependence and weakness, or the bounds of his gifts. The equation of his powers is a negative quantity.

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.

From the orators were made talkers; from historians, polyhistors; from philosophers, sophists; from poets, wits.

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.

Truth would not let herself be approached too closely by highwaymen; she wore one garment on top of another so that one doubted being able to find her body. How frightening if they had their way and saw that frightful ghost, the truth, before them.

If sensibility and understanding as the two branches of human knowledge spring from one common root, to what end such a violent, unauthorized and willful separation of that which nature has joined together! Will not both branches wither away and die through a dichotomy and division of their common root?

The purity of a language dispossesses it of its wealth; a correctness that is all too rigid takes away its strengh and manhood. In a city as big as Paris, forty learned men are procured each year, at no expense, who infalliably know what is pure and polite in their mother tongue and what is neccessary for the monopoly of this junkshop.

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race; just as gardening is older than the cultivated field; painting than writing; song than declamation; parables than syllogisms; barter than trade

What Tarquinius Superbus said in the garden by means of the poppies, the son understood but the messenger did not.

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.

Whoever writes in a foreign language must like a lover accommodate his mode of thinking to it. -- Whoever writes in his native language has the authority of a husband in his own house, if he is in command of it.

A reader who seeks after truth might become a hypochondriac out of dread.

(About the reason why scholars hold inclination towards Arabic as a heresy): [...] one must not accept the customs of a people whose language one loves, nor cover up small coups d'état with the gold plate of language, nor dupe young people and Maecenases into believing that one can fence as soon as one knows how to parry and thrust and hold the épée and body.

The most miraculous researchers into language are also, from time to time, the most impotent exegetes; -- the strongest lawgivers are the destroyers of their tables, or they will become one-eyed through the fault of their children.

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.

If we fail to see God in the sunshine in the pillar of cloud, then in the pillar of fire by night his presence is more visible and emphatic.

The curiosity to know things which are too high for us, which are beyond our horizon, which are unfathomable precisely because of the weakness which makes the future so obscure to us, has led men into many such ludicrous methods and errors.