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.

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

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

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.

Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle rounded and complete in itself. In each of these parts, however, the philosophical Idea is found in a particular specificality or medium. The single circle, because it is a real totality, bursts through the limits imposed by its special medium, and gives rise to a wider circle. The whole of philosophy in this way resembles a circle of circles. The Idea appears in each single circle, but, at the same time, the whole Idea is constituted by the system of these peculiar phases, and each is a necessary member of the organisation.

To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.

We learn from history that we do not learn from history

It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; . . . the individual who has not staked his or her life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he or she has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.

I have the courage to be mistaken.

No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is a valet.

The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony--periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.

Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.

Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.

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.

We learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

The valor that struggles is better than the weakness that endures.

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.

The state of man's mind, or the elementary phase of mind which he so far possesses, conforms precisely to the state of the world as he so far views it

People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger in abstraction, and their light dies away.

Life has value only when it has something valuable as its object.

The substance, the essence, the Spirit is freedom.

Genuine tragedy is a case not of right against wrong but of right against right - two equally justified ethical principles embodied in people of unchangeable will.

The more certain our knowledge the less we know.

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.

A man who has work that suits him and a wife, whom he loves, has squared his accounts with life.

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.

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.

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.

In the case of various kinds of knowledge, we find that what in former days occupied the energies of men of mature mental ability sinks to the level of information, exercises, and even pastimes for children; and in this educational progress we can see the history of the world's culture delineated in faint outline.

Consequently, the sensuous aspect of art is related only to the two theoretical sensesof sight and hearing, while smell, taste, and touch remain excluded.

History is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it.

Philosophy is the history of philosophy.

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.

Poverty in itself does not make men into a rabble; a rabble is created only when there is joined to poverty a disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the rich, against society, against the government.

To him who looks at the world rationally the world looks rationally back.

The spirit is never at rest, but always engaged in progressive motion, giving itself new form.

Beauty is merely the Spiritual making itself known sensuously.

Every idea, extended into infinity, becomes its own opposite.

Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.

No man is a hero to his valet de chamber

Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself.

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.

Everything that from eternity has happened in heaven and earth, the life of God and all the deeds of time simply are the struggles for Spirit to know Itself, to find Itself, be for Itself, and finally unite itself to Itself; it is alienated and divided, but only so as to be able thus to find itself and return to Itself...As existing in an individual form, this liberation is called 'I'; as developed to its totality, it is free Spirit; as feeling, it is Love; and as enjoyment, it is Blessedness.

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.

Whatever is reasonable is true, and whatever is true is reasonable

India has created a special momentum in world history as a country to be searched for knowledge.

The courage of the truth is the first condition of philosophic study.

The Catholics had been in the position of oppressors, and the Protestants of the oppressed

Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as it is to fancy that an individual can overleap his own age, jump over Rhodes.

Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized--the question involuntarily arises--to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.

Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.

God is the absolute truth

The heart is everywhere, and each part of the organism is only the specialized force of the heart itself.

It is a matter of perfect indifference where a thing originated; the only question is: Is it true in and for itself?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational

...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.

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

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

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

In duty the individual acquires his substantive freedom

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.

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

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.

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 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.

History as the slaughter-bench

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

History teaches us that man learns nothing from history

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.

There are Plebes in all classes.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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