52 Quotes by Johann Georg Hamann

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.