Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes

We learn from history that we do not learn from history

To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.

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

Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.

Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.

Everything that from eternity has happened in heaven and earth, the life of God and all the deeds of time simply are the struggles for Spirit to know Itself, to find Itself, be for Itself, and finally unite itself to Itself; it is alienated and divided, but only so as to be able thus to find itself and return to Itself...As existing in an individual form, this liberation is called 'I'; as developed to its totality, it is free Spirit; as feeling, it is Love; and as enjoyment, it is Blessedness.

What history teaches us is that neither nations nor governments ever learn anything from it.

I have the courage to be mistaken.

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.

All education is the art of making men ethical (sittlich), of transforming the old Adam into the new Adam.

It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; . . . the individual who has not staked his or her life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he or she has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.

Public opinion contains all kinds of falsity and truth, but it takes a great man to find the truth in it. The great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age what its will is, and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and the essence of his age, he actualizes his age. The man who lacks sense enough to despise public opinion expressed in gossip will never do anything great.

To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them.

Africa has no history and did not contribute to anything that mankind enjoyed.

Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle rounded and complete in itself. In each of these parts, however, the philosophical Idea is found in a particular specificality or medium. The single circle, because it is a real totality, bursts through the limits imposed by its special medium, and gives rise to a wider circle. The whole of philosophy in this way resembles a circle of circles. The Idea appears in each single circle, but, at the same time, the whole Idea is constituted by the system of these peculiar phases, and each is a necessary member of the organisation.

Every idea, extended into infinity, becomes its own opposite.

An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.

The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in everything.

The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony--periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.

War is progress, peace is stagnation.

No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is a valet.

Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary.

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

The true courage of civilized nations is readiness for sacrifice in the service of the state, so that the individual counts as only one amongst many. The important thing here is not personal mettle but aligning oneself with the universal.

Reading the morning newspaper is the realist's morning prayer.

If you want to love you must serve, if you want freedom you must die.

The valor that struggles is better than the weakness that endures.

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

Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way in which we deceive either ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account; with all its pros and cons, such knowing never gets anywhere, and it knows not why.... The analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, was, in fact, nothing else than ridding it of the form in which it had become familiar.

We learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

Too fair to worship, too divine to love.

Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.

America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself.

What the English call "comfortable" is something endless and inexhaustible. Every condition of comfort reveals in turn its discomfort, and these discoveries go on for ever. Hence the new want is not so much a want of those who have it directly, but is created by those who hope to make profit from it.

A man who has work that suits him and a wife, whom he loves, has squared his accounts with life.

The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself.

The substance, the essence, the Spirit is freedom.

Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me

The state of man's mind, or the elementary phase of mind which he so far possesses, conforms precisely to the state of the world as he so far views it

Genuine tragedy is a case not of right against wrong but of right against right - two equally justified ethical principles embodied in people of unchangeable will.

To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality.

The more certain our knowledge the less we know.

The Catholics had been in the position of oppressors, and the Protestants of the oppressed

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

Freedom is the fundamental character of the will, as weight is of matter... That which is free is the will. Will without freedom is an empty word.

Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.

Life has value only when it has something valuable as its object.

Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized--the question involuntarily arises--to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.

Beauty is merely the Spiritual making itself known sensuously.

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