Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotations

The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in everything.

It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value.

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature.

Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.

The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.

We do not need to be shoemakers to know if our shoes fit, and just as little have we any need to be professionals to acquire knowledge of matters of universal interest.

An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.

To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual.

Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me

Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.

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.

Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.

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.

The Few assume to be the deputies, but they are often only the despoilers of the Many.

Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.

Education is the art of making man ethical.

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

Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help.

Too fair to worship, too divine to love.

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.

The sublime in art is the attempt to express the infinite without finding in the realm of phenomena any object which proves itself fitting for this representation.

In a true tragedy, both parties must be right.

God is, as it were, the sewer into which all contradictions flow.

Reason is just as cunning as she is powerful. Her cunning consists principally in her mediating activity, which, by causing objects to act and re-act on each other in accordance with their own nature, in this way, without any direct interference in the process, carries out reason's intentions.

In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain -- that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.

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.

When we walk the streets at night in safety, it does not strike us that this might be otherwise. This habit of feeling safe has become second nature, and we do not reflect on just how this is due solely to the working of special institutions. Commonplace thinking often has the impression that force holds the state together, but in fact its only bond is the fundamental sense of order which everybody possesses.

On the stage on which we are observing it, — Universal History — Spirit displays itself in its most concrete reality.

Before the end of Time will be the end of History. Before the end of History will be the end of Art.

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.

The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself.

The true is the whole.

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.

What is reasonable is real; that which is real is reasonable.

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.

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.

To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality.

Reading the morning newspaper is the realist's morning prayer.

Philosophy must indeed recognize the possibility that the people rise to it, but must not lower itself to the people.

Science and knowledge, especially that of philosophy, came from the Arabs into the West.

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

History in general is therefore the development of Spirit in Time, as Nature is the development of the Idea is Space.

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.

World history is a court of judgment.

Everybody allows that to know any other science you must have first studied it, and that you can only claim to express a judgment upon it in virtue of such knowledge. Everybody allows that to make a shoe you must have learned and practised the craft of the shoemaker, though every man has a model in his own foot, and possesses in his hands the natural endowments for the operations required. For philosophy alone, it seems to be imagined, such study, care, and application are not in the least requisite

The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. The ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes these stages moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and constitutes thereby the life of the whole.

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.

We assert then that nothing has been accomplished without interest on the part of the actors; and — if interest be called passion, inasmuch as the whole individuality, to the neglect of all other actual or possible interests and claims, is devoted to an object with every fibre of volition, concentrating all its desires and powers upon it — we may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion.

The person must give himself an external sphere of freedom in order to have being as Idea.

Africa has no history and did not contribute to anything that makind enjoyed...

It is because the method of physics does not satisfy the comprehension that we have to go on further.

Serious occupation is labor that has reference to some want.

To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them.

As high as mind stands above nature, so high does the state stand above physical life. Man must therefore venerate the state as a secular deity. The march of God in the world, that is what the State is.

If you want to love you must serve, if you want freedom you must die.

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.

Education to independence demands that young people should be accustomed early to consult their own sense of propriety and their own reason. To regard study as mere receptivity and memory work is to have a most incomplete view of what instruction means.

Children are potentially free and their life directly embodies nothing save potential freedom. Consequently they are not things and cannot be the property either of their parents or others.

War is progress, peace is stagnation.

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.

The State is the Divine idea as it exists on Earth.

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.

In the case of all other sciences, arts, skills, and crafts, everyone is convinced that a complex and laborious programme of learning and practice is necessary for competence. Yet when it comes to philosophy, there seems to be a currently prevailing prejudice to the effect that, although not everyone who has eyes and fingers, and is given leather and last, is at once in a position to make shoes, everyone nevertheless immediately understands how to philosophize.

Since philosophy is the exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the apprehension of the present and the actual, not the erection of a beyond, supposed to exist, God knows where, or rather which exists, and we can perfectly well say where, namely in the error of a one-sided, empty, ratiocination.

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.

Nothing great has been and nothing great can be accomplished without passion. It is only a dead, too often, indeed, a hypocriticalmoralizing which inveighs against the form of passion as such.

When needs and means become abstract in quality, abstraction is also a character of the reciprocal relation of individuals to oneanother. This abstract character, universality, is the character of being recognized and is the moment which makes concrete, i.e. social, the isolated and abstract needs and their ways and means of satisfaction.

The heart-throb for the welfare of humanity therefore passes into the ravings of an insane self-conceit, into the fury of consciousness to preserve itself from destruction; and it does this by expelling from itself the perversion which it is itself, and by striving to look on it and express it as something else.

Destiny is consciousness of oneself, but consciousness of oneself as an enemy.

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.

The real is the rational and the rational is the real.

We must have a new mythology, but it must place itself at the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason. Mythology must become philosophical, so that the people may become rational, and philosophy must become mythological, so that philosophers may become sensible. If we do not give ideas a form that is aesthetic, i.e., mythological, they will hold no interest for people.

What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational. On this conviction the plain man like the philosopher takes his stand,and from it philosophy starts in its study of the universe of mind as well as the universe of nature.

The man whom philosophy leaves cold, and the man whom real faith does not illuminate, may be assured that the fault lies in them, not in knowledge and faith. The former is still an alien to philosophy, the latter an alien to faith.

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.

An individual piece only has meaning when it is seen as part of the whole.

The essence of the modern state is the union of the universal with the full freedom of the particular, and with the welfare of individuals.

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.

There are Plebes in all classes.

What the English call "comfortable" is something endless and inexhaustible. Every condition of comfort reveals in turn its discomfort, and these discoveries go on for ever. Hence the new want is not so much a want of those who have it directly, but is created by those who hope to make profit from it.

History teaches us that man learns nothing from history

What history teaches us is that neither nations nor governments ever learn anything from it.

History as the slaughter-bench

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.

What experience and history teach is this - that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on any lessons they might have drawn from it. Variant: What experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

The ignorant man is not free, because what confronts him is an alien world, something outside him and in the offing, on which he depends, without his having made this foreign world for himself and therefore without being at home in it by himself as in something his own. The impulse of curiosity, the pressure for knowledge, from the lowest level up to the highest rung of philosophical insight arises only from the struggle to cancel this situation of unfreedom and to make the world one's own in one's ideas and thought.

The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary.

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.

In duty the individual acquires his substantive freedom

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

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.

The history of the world is none other than the progress of the , consciousness of freedom.

...if the fear of falling into error is the source of a mistrust in Science, which in the absence of any such misgivings gets on with the work itself and actually does know, it is difficult to see why, conversely, a mistrust should not be placed in this mistrust, and why we should not be concerned that this fear of erring is itself the very error.

What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational

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.

The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and the Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third, Monarchy.

The people are that part of the state that does not know what it wants.

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.

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.