Top 59 Hamann Quotes
#1. The most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment and ... all forms of rationalism ... was Johann Georg Hamann. His influence, direct and indirect, upon the romantic revolt against universalism and scientific method ... was considerable and perhaps crucial.
Isaiah Berlin
#2. Sometimes life is irreverent, and you accidentally discover you are a party to irreverence, and it's hard to know what to do.
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#3. I could never settle for anything less than a renegade and a runaway, a descendant of greatness capable of voluntary disinheritance.
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#4. 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.
Johann Georg Hamann
#5. It's better to keep grief inside. Grief inside works like bees or ants, building curious and perfect structures, complicating you. Grief outside means you want something from someone, and chances are good you won't get it.
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#6. What good to me is the festive garment of freedom when I am in a slave's smock at home?
Johann Georg Hamann
#7. Lies, fables and romances must needs be probable, but not the truth and foundation of our faith.
Johann Georg Hamann
#8. The first time I saw you," I say, "I had a premonition. I had the feeling I'd found the thing I'd always been waiting for. The next time I saw you, it was the same. And every time after it's been the same.
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#9. A thirsty ambition for truth and virtue, and a frenzy to conquer all lies and vices which are not recognized as such nor desire to be; herein consists the heroic spirit of the philosopher.
Johann Georg Hamann
#10. A writer who is in a hurry to be understood today or tomorrow runs the danger of being misunderstood the day after tomorrow.
Johann Georg Hamann
#11. The philosophers have always given truth a bill of divorce, by separating what nature has joined together and vice versa.
Johann Georg Hamann
#12. She acknowledged each person's nearness to the dead and helped the group in its struggle for order-who grieved most, whose pain was most real-because in life there is always hierarchy, and it is frankly not profitable to remain modest and anonymous, not even at a funeral.
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#14. The thirst for vengeance was the beautiful nature which Homer imitated.
Johann Georg Hamann
#15. Boys will be boys, that's what everyone always says. But no one ever mentions how girls have to be something other than themselves altogether.
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#16. When you lose your parents as a child, you are indoctrinated into a club, you re taken into life's severest confidence. You are undeceived.
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#17. Kindness is everything ... When you receive it and express it, it becomes the whole meaning of things. It's life, demystified. A place out of self. Not a waltz, the the whirls within a waltz.
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#18. What Tarquin the Proud said in his garden with the poppy blooms was understood by the son but not by the messenger.
Johann Georg Hamann
#19. 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.
Johann Georg Hamann
#20. Everything is vain and tortures the spirit instead of calming and satisfying it.
Johann Georg Hamann
#21. Mine is not a smiling face. Strangers on the street always say, Smile! But my muscles do not naturally go there.
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#22. The most awful hunger is the type that is satisfied too soon, before it moves you, before you are moved by it, before it becomes protracted and superior, a motivating business, making you honorable, graceful, clever - a hunter.
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#23. My mother refuses to go into the ocean. She respects it, she says, which is basically the same as saying she's afraid. I go in because it scares me ...
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#24. Self knowledge begins with the neighbor, the mirror, and just the same with true self-love; that goes from the mirror to the matter
Johann Georg Hamann
#25. If only I was as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would have to do no more than repeat a single word three times.
Johann Georg Hamann
#26. But in fact there are infinite subtleties to identity-that is to say, there is the way that you are, which is the sum of the way you are becoming and the way you have been, which does not take into account the way you secretly wish to be.
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#27. Not only the entire ability to think rests on language ... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.
Johann Georg Hamann
#30. Whatever Elisabeth did, Franz Joseph's affection remained unchanged.
Brigitte Hamann
#31. I look upon logical proofs the way a well-bred girl looks upon a love letter
Johann Georg Hamann
#32. Physics is nothing but the ABC's. Nature is an equation with an unknown, a Hebrew word which is written only with consonants to which reason has to add the dots.
Johann Georg Hamann
#33. I was an American girl; I possessed what our culture valued most-independance and blind courage.
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#34. People with motorcycles always assume that everyone without one wants a ride. I didn't want to offend him, so I said sure.
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#36. The sea slapped ominously, confessing its strategic impartiality. The sea is an international sea, and the sky a universal sky. Often we forget that. Often we think that what is verging upon us is ours alone. We forget that there are other sides entirely.
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#38. Nature is a book, a letter, a fairy tale (in the philosophical sense) or whatever you want to call it.
Johann Georg Hamann
#39. Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves.
Johann Georg Hamann
#41. Few authors understand themselves, and a proper reader must not only understand his author but also be able to see beyond him
Johann Georg Hamann
#42. Someone who knows she is beautiful, who is always told that she is beautiful, but who, deep down, does not feel very beautiful.
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#44. Thus the public use of reason and freedom is nothing but a dessert, a sumptuous dessert.
Johann Georg Hamann
#46. Nothing is an easy thing to feel but a difficult thing to express (pg 20).
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#47. Our reason arises, at the very least, from this twofold lesson of sensuous revelations and human testimonies.
Johann Georg Hamann
#48. Sometimes a day is a symbolic day, and you behave symbolically. Sometimes you search inside for a feeling, and, finding none, you remember that no feeling is frequently the most possible feeling.
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#50. The farther reason looks the greater is the haze in which it loses itself.
Johann Georg Hamann
#51. Optimism is when you're not sure where life is going to take you, so naturally you anticipate the best possible outcome
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#52. Being, belief and reason are pure relations, which cannot be dealt with absolutely, and are not things but pure scholastic concepts, signs for understanding, not for worshipping, aids to awaken our attention, not to fetter it.
Johann Georg Hamann
#53. I wondered what the value was, in the Darwinian sense, of making fast friends like that. There must be some scientific significance to being a follower, to allowing yourself to be persuaded by personality
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#54. 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.
Johann Georg Hamann
#55. 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.
Johann Georg Hamann
#56. If she could no longer be called beautiful, she possessed something better-a knowledge of beauty; it's inflated value, it's inevitable loss.
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#58. 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.
Johann Georg Hamann
#59. The weakness of ourselves and of our reason makes us see flaws in beauties by making us consider everything piece by piece.
Johann Georg Hamann
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