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.
Pessimism is a very easy way out because it is a short view of life. If you look at what is happening around us today, you can't help but feel that life is a terrible complexity of problems. But if you look back a few thousand years, you realize that we have advanced fantastically. If you take a long view, I do not see how you can be pessimistic about the future of mankind.
Hold everything earthly with a loose hand, but grasp eternal things with a death-like grip
Sometimes we talked about the nature of the human soul and about the Cosmic Unity of souls that I had believed in so firmly when I was 15 years old. My mother did not like the phrase Cosmic Unity. It was too pretentious. She preferred to call it a world soul.
If we have never had the experience of taking our commonplace religious shoes off our commonplace religious feet, and getting rid of all the undue familiarity with which we approach God, it is questionable whether we have ever stood in his presence.
Everything must be free to be written and published without restraint.
Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another.
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