The weakness of ourselves and of our reason makes us see flaws in beauties by making us consider everything piece by piece.
Interpretation
Our own limitations can lead us to focus on imperfections rather than appreciating the whole.
This quote by Johann Georg Hamann suggests that our inherent weaknesses and the limitations of our reasoning abilities often cause us to overlook the beauty in things. Instead of seeing the complete and harmonious picture, we tend to dissect and critiquely analyze every single part, which can obscure our appreciation for the overall beauty that exists in life.
In practice
In a speech about embracing imperfections in art and life.
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.
Nature is a book, a letter, a fairy tale (in the philosophical sense) or whatever you want to call it.
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.
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.
Everything is vain and tortures the spirit instead of calming and satisfying it.
Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.
There is no substitute for virtue. Keep your thoughts virtuous. Rise above the filth that's all around you in this world and stand tall in strength and virtue. You can do this and you will be happier for it for as long as you live. God bless you in cherishing, developing and holding on to this great gift, the quality of personal virtue.
No matter how much care we put into hiding our passions under the appearances of devotion and honor, they can always be seen to peer out through these covers.
The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship
Only those persons who have lived, really lived, are ready, welcoming, receptive, thankful to death. Then death is not the enemy. Then death becomes the fulfillment.
Christianity has been successfully attacked and marginalized… because those who professed belief were unable to defend the faith from attack, even though its attackers’ arguments were deeply flawed.
We must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day had been.
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