Quotes from Johann Georg 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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