Georg Hegel Quotes

Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion.

We learn from history that we do not learn from history.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

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

What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

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

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

Education is the art of making man ethical

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

The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the coming of the dusk.

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.

Too fair to worship, too divine to love.

When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interests which is thereby designated.

People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger in abstraction, and their light dies away.

Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.

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

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

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.

Art does not simply reveal God: it is one of the ways in which God reveals, and thus actualizes, himself.

We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.

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

World history is a court of judgment

History in general is therefore the development of Spirit in Time, as Nature is the development of the Idea is Space.

The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. The ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes these stages moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and constitutes thereby the life of the whole.

this is love. I have my self-consciousness not in myself but in the other. I am satisfied and have peace with myself only in this other and I AM only because I have peace with myself; if I did not have it then I would be a contradiction that falls to pieces. This other, because it likewise exists outside itself, has its self-consciousness only in me; and both the other and I are only this consciousness of being-outside-ourselves and of our identity; we are only this intuition, feeling, and knowledge of our unity. This is love, and without knowing that love is both a distinguishing and the sublation of this distinction, one speaks emptily of it.

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.

The anti-human, the merely animal, consists in staying within the sphere of feeling, and being able to communicate only at that level". (1807, § 69).

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

What is reasonable is real; that which is real is reasonable.

The one who merely flees is not yet free. In fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees.

Uneducated people delight in argument and fault-finding, for it is easy to find fault, but difficult to recognize the good and its inner necessity.

War is progress, peace is stagnation

If we go on to cast a look at the fate of world historical personalities... we shall find it to have been no happy one. They attained no calm enjoyment; their whole life was labor and trouble; their whole nature was nothing but their master passion. When their object is attained they fall off like empty hulls from the kernel. They die early, like Alexander; they are murdered, like Casear; transported to St. Helena, like Napoleon.

Reading the morning newspaper is the realist's morning prayer. One orients one's attitude toward the world either by God or by what the world is. The former gives as much security as the latter, in that one knows how one stands.

I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.

It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen.

By Nature man is not what he ought to be; only through a transforming process does he arrive at truth.

When a father inquired about the best method of educating his son in ethical conduct, a Pythagorean replied: "Make him a citizen of a state with good laws

If we are in a general way permitted to regard human activity in the realm of the beautiful as a liberation of the soul, as a release from constraint and restriction, in short to consider that art does actually alleviate the most overpowering and tragic catastrophes by means of the creations it offers to our contemplation and enjoyment, it is the art of music which conducts us to the final summit of that ascent to freedom.

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

Every consciousness pursues the death of the other.

Beauty and art, no doubt, pervade all business of life like a kindly genius, and form the bright adornment of all our surroundings, both mental and material, soothing the sadness of our condition and the embarrassments of real life, killing time in entertaining fashion, and where there’s nothing to be achieved, occupying the place of what is vicious, better, at any rate, than vice.

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

The very fact that something is determined as a limitation implies that the limitation is already transcended.

For Hegel, by contrast, liberal society is a reciprocal and equal agreement among citizens to mutually recognize each other

Wickedness also resides in the gaze that perceives itself as innocent and surrounded by wickedness.

History teaches us that man learns nothing from history.

Art is the sensuous presentation of ideas

My criticism of Hegel procedure is that when in his discussion he arrives at a contradiction, he construes it as a crisis in the universe.

It is hard to see why we should not turn round and mistrust this very mistrust. Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself?

We must have a new mythology, but it must place itself at the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason. Mythology must become philosophical, so that the people may become rational, and philosophy must become mythological, so that philosophers may become sensible. If we do not give ideas a form that is aesthetic, i.e., mythological, they will hold no interest for people.

Everybody allows that to know any other science you must have first studied it, and that you can only claim to express a judgment upon it in virtue of such knowledge. Everybody allows that to make a shoe you must have learned and practised the craft of the shoemaker, though every man has a model in his own foot, and possesses in his hands the natural endowments for the operations required. For philosophy alone, it seems to be imagined, such study, care, and application are not in the least requisite

The vanity of the contents” of individual experience is scrutable as an inessential trapping drawn into a matter by vested interests “…since it is at the same time the vanity of the self that knows itself to be vain

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.

We stand at the gates of an important epoch, a time of ferment, when spirit moves forward in a leap, transcends its previous shape and takes on a new one..... A new phase of the spirit is preparing itself. Philosophy especially has to welcome its appearance and acknowledge it, while others, who oppose it impotently, cling the past.

The Christian imagination bas produced nothing but an insipid legend.

Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.

لايمكن للعقل أن يحكم الواقع ما لم يصبح الواقع في حدّ ذاته معقولا

what is rational is real and what is real is rational

The important question of how poverty can be remedied is one which agitates and torments modern societies especially

What makes comet wine so good is that the water-process detaches itself from the earth and thus brings about an altered state in the planet.

But if they realize that their true freedom consists in the acceptance of principles, of laws which are the own, a synthesis of universal and particular interests becomes possible.

By means of the simple folk remedy of ascribing to feeling what is the millennia-long labor of reason and of its understanding, all are spared the bother of rational insight and knowledge.

is—it is necessary to come first to an understanding concerning knowledge, which is looked upon as the instrument by which to take possession of the Absolute, or as the means through which to get a sight of it.

Each consciousness seeks the death of the other.

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

It is not a very pleasing spectacle to observe uncultivated ignorance and crudity of mind, with neither form nor taste, without the capacity to concentrate its thoughts on an abstract proposition, still less on a connected statement of such propositions, confidently proclaiming itself to be intellectual freedom and

The only Thought which Philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of History, is the simple conception of Reason; that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process.

Once the world of ideas has been transformed, reality cannot hold out for long. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In the case where the self is merely represented and ideally presented (vorgestellt), there it is not actual: where it is by proxy, it is not.

Nada de grandioso se faz no mundo sem paixão.

Commending myself to your kind memories, I wish you pleasant holidays.

Das Widermenschliche, das Tierische besteht darin, im Gefühle stehen zu bleiben und nur durch dieses sich mitteilen zu können.

Lacking strength beauty hates the understanding for asking of her what it cannot do but the life of spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being.

The system of logic is the realm of shadows, the world of simple essentialities, freed of all sensuous concretion. To study this science, to dwell and to labor in this realm of shadows, is the absolute culture and discipline of consciousness.

To judge a thing that has substance and solid worth is quite easy, to comprehend it is much harder, and to blend judgement and comprehension in a definitive description is the hardest thing of all.

To the philosopher, infinity, knowledge, movement, empirical laws, etc., are things just as familiar {as family relations}. And as her dead brother and uncle are present to the peasant woman, thus Plato, Spinoza, etc. are present to the philosopher. The one has as much reality as the other, but the latter are immortal.

When we say, "God is love," we are saying something very great and true. But it would be senseless to grasp this saying in a simple-minded way as a simple definition, without analyzing what love is. For love is a distinguishing of two, who nevertheless are absolutely not distinguished for each other. The consciousness or feeling of the identity of the two - to be outside of myself and in the other - this is love. I have my self-consciousness not in myself but in the other. I am satisfied and have peace with myself only in this other - and I am only because I have peace with myself; if I did not have it, then I would be a contradiction that falls to pieces. This other, because it likewise exists outside itself, has its self-consciousness only in me, and both the other and I are only this consciousness of being-outside-ourselves and of our identity; we are only this intuition, feeling, and knowledge of our unity. This is love, and without knowing that love is both a distinguishing and the sublation of the distinction, one speaks emptily of it. This is the simple, eternal idea.

The significance of that 'absolute commandment', know thyself — whether we look at it in itself or under the historical circumstances of its first utterance — is not to promote mere self-knowledge in respect of the particular capacities, character, propensities, and foibles of the single self. The knowledge it commands means that of man's genuine reality — of what is essentially and ultimately true and real — of spirit as the true and essential bein

Aber die Philosophie soll keine Erzählung dessen sein, was geschieht, sondern eine Erkenntnis dessen, was wahr darin ist, und aus dem Wahren soll sie ferner das begreifen, was in der Erzählung als ein bloßes Geschehen erscheint.

The spirit is never at rest but always engaged in ever progressive motion, in giving itself a new form.

The only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.

De uil van Minerva vliegt pas uit bij het invallen van de duisternis.

Die Wahrheit des Seins ist Wesen

Only by resolving can a human being step into actuality, however bitter this may be to him. Inertia lacks the will to abandon the inward brooding which allows it to retain everything as as a possibility. But possibility is not yet actuality.

It is specially characteristic of the German that the more servile he on the one hand is, the more uncontrolled is he on the other; restraint and want of restraint—originality, is the angel of darkness that buffets us.

When I was young, most teachers of philosophy in British and American universities were Hegelians, so that, until I read Hegel, I supposed there must be some truth to his system; I was cured, however, by discovering that everything he said on the philosophy of mathematics was plain nonsense.

It is when subjective consciousness maintains its independence of everything, that it says, 'It is I who through my educated thoughts can annul all determinations of right, morality, good, &c., because I am clearly master of them, and I know that if anything seems good to me I can easily subvert it, because things are only true to me in so far as they please me now.' This irony is thus only a trifling with everything, and it can transform all things into show: to this subjectivity nothing is any longer serious, for any seriousness which it has, immediately becomes dissipated again in jokes, and all noble or divine truth vanishes away or becomes mere triviality.

The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change. The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world.

To babble unintelligible prayers, to read masses, to recite rosaries, to practice ceremonies of religious worship empty of meaning, this is the conduct of the dead. Man tries to turn completely into an object, to subject himself entirely to the rule of what is alien. Such service is called devoutness. PHARISEES!

The thinking or figurate conception which has before it only a specific, determinate being must be referred back to the [...] beginning of the science made by Parmenides who purified and elevated his own figurate conception, and so, too, that of posterity, to pure thought, to being as such and thereby created the element of the science. What is the first in the science had of necessity to show itself historically as the first. And we must regard the Eleatic One or being as the first step in the knowledge of thought.

It is the universal nature of human Bildung to constitute itself as a universal intellectual being. Whoever abandons himself to his particularity is ungebildet ("unformed")—e.g., if someone gives way to blind anger without measure or sense of proportion. Hegel shows that basically such a man is lacking in the power of abstraction. He cannot turn his gaze from himself towards something universal, from which his own particular being is determined in measure and proportion.

the Beautiful is the expression of the absolute Spirit, which is truth itself. This region of Divine truth as artistically presented to perception and feeling, forms the center of the whole world of Art. It is a self-contained, free, divine formation which has completely appropriated the elements of external form as material, and which employs them only as the means of manifesting itself.

The many ... whom one chooses to call the people, are indeed a collection, but only as a multitude, a formless mass, whose movement and action would be elemental, irrational, savage, and terrible." "Public opinion deserves ... to be esteemed as much as to be despised; to be despised for its concrete consciousness and expression, to be esteemed for its essential fundamental principle, which only shines, more or less dimly, through its concrete expression." "The definition of the freedom of the press as freedom to say and write what one pleases, is parallel to the one of freedom in general, viz., as freedom to do what one pleases. Such a view belongs to the uneducated crudity and superficiality of naïve thinking." "In public opinion all is false and true, but to discover the truth in it is the business of the great man. The great man of his time is he who expresses the will and the meaning of that time, and then brings it to completion; he acts according to the inner spirit and essence of his time, which he realizes. And he who does not understand how to despise public opinion, as it makes itself heard here and there, will never accomplish anything great." "The laws of morality are not accidental, but are essentially Rational. It is the very object of the State that what is essential in the practical activity of men, and in their dispositions, should be duly recognized; that it should have a manifest existence, and maintain its position. It is the absolute interest of Reason that this moral Whole should exist; and herein lies the justification and merit of heroes who have founded states - however rude these may have been." "Such are all great historical men, whose own particular aims involve those large issues which are the will of the World Spirit. ... World historical men - the Heroes of an epoch - must be recognized as its clear-sighted ones; their deeds, their words are the best of that time. Great men have formed purposes to satisfy themselves, not others." "A World-Historical individual is devoted to the One Aim, regardless of all else. It is even possible that such men may treat other great, even sacred interests inconsiderately; conduct which is indeed obnoxious to moral reprehension. But so mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower or crush to pieces many an object in its path.

We assert then that nothing has been accomplished without interest on the part of the actors; and — if interest be called passion, inasmuch as the whole individuality, to the neglect of all other actual or possible interests and claims, is devoted to an object with every fibre of volition, concentrating all its desires and powers upon it — we may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion.

Man is an animal, but even in his animal functions, he is not confined to the implicit, as the animal is; he becomes conscious of them, recognizes them, and lifts them, as, for instance, the process of digestion, into self-conscious science. In this way man breaks the barrier of his implicit and immediate character, so that precisely because he knows that he is an animal, he ceases to be an animal and attains knowledge of himself as spirit.

In a state which is really articulated rationally all the laws and organizations are nothing but a realization of freedom in its essential characteristics. When this is the case, the individual’s reason finds in these institutions, only the actuality of his own essence, and if he obeys these laws, he coincides, not with something alien to himself, but simply with what is his own. Freedom of choice, of course, is often equally called ‘freedom’; but freedom of choice is only non-rational freedom, choice and self-determination issuing not from the rationality of the will but from fortuitous impulses and their dependence on sense and the external world.

In the independent existence that work gives the thing, working consciousness finds itself again as an independent consciousness. Work is restrained desire. In forming the object—that is, in being selflessly active and concerned with a universal—working consciousness raises itself above the immediacy of its existence to universality; or, as Hegel puts it, by forming the thing it forms itself. What he means is that in acquiring a “capacity,” a skill, man gains the sense of himself. What seemed denied him in the selflessness of serving, inasmuch as he subjected himself to a frame of mind that was alien to him, becomes part of him inasmuch as he is working consciousness. As such he finds in himself his own frame of mind, and it is quite right to say of work that it forms. The self-awareness of working consciousness contains all the elements that make up practical Bildung: the distancing from the immediacy of desire, of personal need and private interest, and the exacting demand of a universal.

When, therefore, a man is told, “You (your inner being) are so and so, because your skull-bone is so constituted,” this means nothing else than that we regard a bone as the man's reality. To retort upon such a statement with a box on the ear — in the way mentioned above when dealing with psysiognomy — removes primarily the “soft” parts of his head from their apparent dignity and position, and proves merely that these are no true inherent nature, are not the reality of mind; the retort here would, properly speaking, have to go the length of breaking the skull of the person who makes a statement like that, in order to demonstrate to him in a manner as palpable as his own wisdom that a bone is nothing of an inherent nature at all for a man, still less his true reality.

Philosophy is, by its very nature, something esoteric, neither made for the vulgar as it stands [für sich], nor capable of being got up to suit the vulgar taste; it only is philosophy in virtue of being directly opposed to the understanding and hence even more opposed to healthy common sense, under which label we understand the limitedness in space and time of a race of men; in its relationship to common sense the world of philosophy is in and for itself an inverted world .21 When Alexander, having heard that his teacher was publishing written essays on his philosophy, wrote to him from the heart of Asia that he ought not to have vulgarized the philosophizing they had done together, Aristotle defended himself by saying that his philosophy was published and yet also not published. In the same way philosophy [now] must certainly admit [erkennen] the possibility that the people can rise to it, but it must not lower itself to the people. But in these times of freedom and equality, in which such a large educated public has been formed, that will not allow anything to be shut away from it, but considers itself good for anything – or everything good enough for it – in these times even the highest beauty and the greatest good have not been able to escape the fate of being mishandled by the common mob which cannot rise to what it sees floating above it, until it has been made common enough to be fit for their possessing; so that vulgarization has forced its way into being recognized as a meritorious kind of labour. There is no aspect of the higher striving of the human spirit that has not experienced this fate. An Idea, in art or in philosophy, needs only to be glimpsed in order for the processing to start by which it is properly stirred up into material for the pulpit, for text books, and for the household use of the newspaper public.