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.

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

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

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

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.

In a true tragedy, both parties must be right.

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