52 Quotes by Johann Georg Hamann

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.