The aim of science is to apprehend this purely intelligible world as a thing in itself, an object which is what it is independently of all thinking, and thus antithetical to the sensible world.... The world of thought is the universal, the timeless and spaceless, the absolutely necessary, whereas the world of sense is the contingent, the changing and moving appearance which somehow indicates or symbolizes it.

The value of history. ..is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that... he is going to be a beginner all his life.

Like other revolutionaries I can thank God for the reactionaries. They clarify the issue.

Nothing capable of being memorized is history.

The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind.

To regard such a positive mental science [psychology] as rising above the sphere of history, and establishing the permanent and unchanging laws of human nature, is therefore possible only to a person who mistakes the transient conditions of a certain historical age for the permanent conditions of human life.