Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes

But even regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimised - the question involuntarily arises - to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Whatever is reasonable is true, and whatever is true is reasonable ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The Beautiful is the expression of the absolute Spirit, which is truth itself. This region of Divine truth as artistically presented to perception and feeling, forms the center of the whole world of Art. It is a self-contained, free, divine formation which has completely appropriated the elements of external form as material, and which employs them only as the means of manifesting itself. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Before the end of Time will be the end of History. Before the end of History will be the end of Art. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

But if they realize that their true freedom consists in the acceptance of principles, of laws which are the own, a synthesis of universal and particular interests becomes possible. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The substance, the essence, the Spirit is freedom. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

It strikes everyone in beginning to form an acquaintance with the treasures of Indian literature that a land so rich in intellectual products and those of the profoundest order of thought. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Reading the morning newspaper is the realist's morning prayer. One orients one's attitude toward the world either by God or by what the world is. The former gives as much security as the latter, in that one knows how one stands. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The very fact that something is determined as a limitation implies that the limitation is already transcended. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The anti-human, the merely animal, consists in staying within the sphere of feeling, and being able to communicate only at that level". (1807, § 69). ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The proofs of the existence of God are to such an extent fallen into discredit that they pass for something antiquated, belonging to days gone by. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In history, we are concerned with what has been and what is; in philosophy, however, we are concerned not with what belongs exclusively to the past or to the future, but with that which is, both now and eternally - in short, with reason. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

When Philosophy with its abstractions paints grey in grey, the freshness and life of youth has gone, the reconciliation is not a reconciliation in the actual, but in the ideal world. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

It is because the method of physics does not satisfy the comprehension that we have to go on further. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

It is not a very pleasing spectacle to observe uncultivated ignorance and crudity of mind, with neither form nor taste, without the capacity to concentrate its thoughts on an abstract proposition, still less on a connected statement of such propositions, confidently proclaiming itself to be intellectual freedom and ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In a state which is really articulated rationally all the laws and organizations are nothing but a realization of freedom in its essential characteristics. When this is the case, the individual's reason finds in these institutions, only the actuality of his own essence, and if he obeys these laws, he coincides, not with something alien to himself, but simply with what is his own. Freedom of choice, of course, is often equally called 'freedom'; but freedom of choice is only non-rational freedom, choice and self-determination issuing not from the rationality of the will but from fortuitous impulses and their dependence on sense and the external world. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

When I was young, most teachers of philosophy in British and American universities were Hegelians, so that, until I read Hegel, I supposed there must be some truth to his system; I was cured, however, by discovering that everything he said on the philosophy of mathematics was plain nonsense. ~ Bertrand Russell

To babble unintelligible prayers, to read masses, to recite rosaries, to practice ceremonies of religious worship empty of meaning, this is the conduct of the dead. Man tries to turn completely into an object, to subject himself entirely to the rule of what is alien. Such service is called devoutness. PHARISEES! ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The true courage of civilized nations is readiness for sacrifice in the service of the state, so that the individual counts as only one amongst many. The important thing here is not personal mettle but aligning oneself with the universal. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

I have the courage to be mistaken. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Because of its concrete content, sense-certainty immediately appears as the richest kind of knowledge, indeed a knowledge of infinite wealth for which no bounds can be found, either when we reach out into space and time in which it is dispersed, or when we take a bit of this wealth, and by division enter into it. Moreover, sense-certainty appears to be the truest knowledge ... but, in the event, this very certainty proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth. All that it says about what it knows is just that it is; and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way in which we deceive either ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account; with all its pros and cons, such knowing never gets anywhere, and it knows not why ... The analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, was, in fact, nothing else than ridding it of the form in which it had become familiar. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The real is the rational and the rational is the real. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

crowd of frenzied females, ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State ... For Truth is the unity of the universal and subjective will; and the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth. We have in it, therefore, the object of history in a more definite shape than before; that in which Freedom obtains objectivity. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality. Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The State is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Commending myself to your kind memories, I wish you pleasant holidays. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The people are that part of the state that does not know what it wants. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

My criticism of Hegel procedure is that when in his discussion he arrives at a contradiction, he construes it as a crisis in the universe. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The Christian imagination bas produced nothing but an insipid legend. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Each consciousness seeks the death of the other. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

What is reasonable is real; that which is real is reasonable. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

When we say, "God is love," we are saying something very great and true. But it would be senseless to grasp this saying in a simple-minded way as a simple definition, without analyzing what love is. For love is a distinguishing of two, who nevertheless are absolutely not distinguished for each other. The consciousness or feeling of the identity of the two - to be outside of myself and in the other - this is love. I have my self-consciousness not in myself but in the other. I am satisfied and have peace with myself only in this other - and I am only because I have peace with myself; if I did not have it, then I would be a contradiction that falls to pieces. This other, because it likewise exists outside itself, has its self-consciousness only in me, and both the other and I are only this consciousness of being-outside-ourselves and of our identity; we are only this intuition, feeling, and knowledge of our unity. This is love, and without knowing that love is both a distinguishing and the sublation of the distinction, one speaks emptily of it. This is the simple, eternal idea. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The spirit is never at rest, but always engaged in progressive motion, giving itself new form. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

By means of the simple folk remedy of ascribing to feeling what is the millennia-long labor of reason and of its understanding, all are spared the bother of rational insight and knowledge. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

World history is a court of judgment ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Education is the art of making man ethical ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In the words of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, "Human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds. ~ Alena Graedon

The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the coming of the dusk. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in everything. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Serious occupation is labor that has reference to some want. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Africa has no history and did not contribute to anything that makind enjoyed ... ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Beauty and art pervade all the business of life like a kindly genius, brightly adorning our surroundings whether interior or exterior, mitigating the seriousness of existence and the complexities of the real life, extinguishing idleness in an entertaining fashion, and, where there is nothing good to be achieved, filling the place of vice better than vice itself. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

History is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Life has value only when it has something valuable as its object. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The nature of finite things is to have the seed of their passing-away as their essential being: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

All that is real is reasonable, and all that is reasonable is real. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

India has created a special momentum in world history as a country to be searched for knowledge. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

With regard to the purpose, one should not immediately or should not merely think of the form in which it is in consciousness, as a determination on hand in the representation. Through the concept of inner purposiveness, Kant re-awakened the idea in general and that of life in particular. Aristotle's determination of life already contains the inner purposiveness and thus stands infinitely far beyond the concept of modern teleology which has only the finite, the external purposiveness in view. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The beginning of religion, more precisely its content, is the concept of religion itself, that God is the absolute truth, the truth of all things, and subjectively that religion alone is the absolutely true knoweldge. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. ~ Karl Marx

On the stage on which we are observing it, - Universal History - Spirit displays itself in its most concrete reality. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

It is specially characteristic of the German that the more servile he on the one hand is, the more uncontrolled is he on the other; restraint and want of restraint - originality, is the angel of darkness that buffets us. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

War is progress, peace is stagnation ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In a true tragedy, both parties must be right. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole spring of actions. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Freedom is the fundamental character of the will, as weight is of matter ... That which is free is the will. Will without freedom is an empty word. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The life of God - the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things - may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In the Soul is the awaking of Consciousness: Consciousness sets itself up as Reason, awaking at one bound to the sense of its rationality: and this Reason by its activity emancipates itself to objectivity and the consciousness of its intelligent unity. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In duty the individual acquires his substantive freedom ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

No man is a hero to his valet de chamber ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The thinking or figurate conception which has before it only a specific, determinate being must be referred back to the [ ... ] beginning of the science made by Parmenides who purified and elevated his own figurate conception, and so, too, that of posterity, to pure thought, to being as such and thereby created the element of the science. What is the first in the science had of necessity to show itself historically as the first. And we must regard the Eleatic One or being as the first step in the knowledge of thought. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Animals are in possession of themselves; their soul is in possession of their body. But they have no right to their life, because they do not will it. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The courage of the truth is the first condition of philosophic study. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Beauty and art, no doubt, pervade all business of life like a kindly genius, and form the bright adornment of all our surroundings, both mental and material, soothing the sadness of our condition and the embarrassments of real life, killing time in entertaining fashion, and where there's nothing to be achieved, occupying the place of what is vicious, better, at any rate, than vice. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The essence of the modern state is that the universal be bound up with the complete freedom of its particular members and with private well-being, that thus the interests of family and civil society must concentrate themselves on the state. It is only when both these moments subsist in their strength that the state can be regarded as articulated and genuinely organized. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

If we go on to cast a look at the fate of world historical personalities ... we shall find it to have been no happy one. They attained no calm enjoyment; their whole life was labor and trouble; their whole nature was nothing but their master passion. When their object is attained they fall off like empty hulls from the kernel. They die early, like Alexander; they are murdered, like Casear; transported to St. Helena, like Napoleon. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Science and knowledge, especially that of philosophy, came from the Arabs into the West. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The soul is presupposed as a ready-made agent, which displays such features as its acts and utterances, from which we can learn what it is, what sort of faculties and powers it possesses
all without being aware that the act and utterance of what the soul is really invests it with that character in our conception and makes it reach a higher stage of being than it explicitly had before. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The true is thus the bacchanalian whirl in which no member is not drunken; and because each, as soon as it detaches itself, dissolves immediately - the whirl is just as much transparent and simple repose. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

For us, mind has nature for its premise, being nature's truth and for that reason its absolute prius. In this truth nature has vanished, and mind has resulted as the idea arrived at being-for-itself, the object of which, as well as the subject, is the concept. This identity is absolute negativity, for whereas in nature the concept has its perfect external objectivity, this its alienation has been superseded, and in this alienation the concept has become identical with itself. But it is this identity therefore, only in being a return out of nature. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

[T]he vanity of the contents" of individual experience is scrutable as an inessential trapping drawn into a matter by vested interests " ... since it is at the same time the vanity of the self that knows itself to be vain ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

History is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Public opinion contains all kinds of falsity and truth, but it takes a great man to find the truth in it. The great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age what its will is, and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and the essence of his age, he actualizes his age. The man who lacks sense enough to despise public opinion expressed in gossip will never do anything great. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The people will learn to feel the dignity of man. They will not merely demand their rights, which have been trampled in the dust, but themselves will take them - make them their own. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

History teaches us that man learns nothing from history ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The only Thought which Philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of History, is the simple conception of Reason; that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Thinking is, indeed, essentially the negation of that which is before us. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

God is, as it were, the sewer into which all contradictions flow. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

One more word about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed ...
When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The evident character of this defective cognition of which mathematics is proud, and on which it plumes itself before philosophy, rests solely on the poverty of its purpose and the defectiveness of its stuff, and is therefore of a kind that philosophy must spurn ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interests which is thereby designated. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel