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.

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

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

No man is a hero to his valet de chamber

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

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