Johann Georg Hamann Quotes

The belief of our Reason is an Exercise of Faith, and Faith is an Act of Reason.

To accept reason is impossible if you don't already possess it.

Intuition does not in itself amount to knowledge, yet cannot be disregarded by philosophers and psychologists.

Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Reason enables us to get around in the world of ideas, but cannot prescribe our thoughts.

That which exercises reason is more excellent than that which does not exercise reason

Ignorance is in relationship to content; it is not just a spirit of ignorance. In verse 21 it speaks of "the truth in Jesus." Truth is content, truth has something to do with reason. Truth has something to do with the rational creature that God has made us. The dilemma here in the internal world is not just some sort of grey fog, it is in relationship to content.

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.

He that cannot reason is a fool.

A train of thought is never false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence.

And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream.

Language was a huge expansion of that capacity to deal with information.

An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis.

If we did not have rational souls, we would not be able to believe.

Logic teaches rules for presentation, not thinking.

Reason is God's crowning gift to man.

Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious.

The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.

Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!

The senses are of the earth, the reason stands apart from them in contemplation.

The true function of philosophy is to educate us in the principles of reasoning and not to put an end to further reasoning by the introduction of fixed conclusions.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.