Johann Georg Hamann Quotes

A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.

Language is one of the thin walls humanity has built up over centuries against its own bestial and destructive impulses.

Religion and morality are the essential pillars of civil society.

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

Reason is God's crowning gift to man.

Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.

Language. By this we build pyramids, fight battles, ordain and administer laws, shape and teach religion, and knit man to man, cultivate each other, and ourselves.

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

A man without words is a man without thought.

For out of fear and need each religion is born, creeping into existence on the byways or reason.

Being that can be understood is language.

Society in its full sense ... is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it. No individual can arrive even at the threshold of his potentialities without a culture in which he participates. Conversely, no civilization has in it any element which in the last analysis is not the contribution of an individual.

Reason is one thing and faith is another and reason can as little be made a substitute for faith, as faith can be made a substitute for reason.

It was a profound saying of Wilhelm Humboldt, that 'Man is man only by means of speech, but in order to invent speech he must be already man.'

Man is a social animal formed to please in society.

A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.

Adjectives are the curse of America.

Religion is one of the phases of thought through which the world is passing.

Speech is the index of the mind.

What would have been the effect upon religion if it had come to us through the minds of women?

He that cannot reason is a fool.

I am not an atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds.

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

Language is a form of organized stutter.

Language is the light of the mind