52 Quotes by Johann Georg Hamann

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.

(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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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