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

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

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

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

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.

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

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