Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Serious occupation is labor that has reference to some want.

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.

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

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.

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

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negativity, for whereas in nature the concept has its perfect external objectivity, this its alienation has been superseded, and in this alienation the concept has become identical with itself.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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

God is the absolute truth...

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

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

If we go on to cast a look at the fate of these World-Historical persons, whose vocation it was to be the agents of the World-Spirit, we shall find it to have been no happy one. They attained no calm enjoyment; their whole life was labour and trouble; their whole nature was nought else 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 Caesar.

Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.