Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature.

In a true tragedy, both parties must be right.

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negativity, for whereas in nature the concept has its perfect external objectivity, this its alienation has been superseded, and in this alienation the concept has become identical with itself.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

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.

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.

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

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.