Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes & Sayings

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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 ... 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. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

There are Plebes in all classes. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Education to independence demands that young people should be accustomed early to consult their own sense of propriety and their own reason. To regard study as mere receptivity and memory work is to have a most incomplete view of what instruction means. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

What is reasonable is real; that which is real is reasonable. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and the Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third, Monarchy. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

When needs and means become abstract in quality, abstraction is also a character of the reciprocal relation of individuals to oneanother. This abstract character, universality, is the character of being recognized and is the moment which makes concrete, i.e. social, the isolated and abstract needs and their ways and means of satisfaction. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

When we walk the streets at night in safety, it does not strike us that this might be otherwise. This habit of feeling safe has become second nature, and we do not reflect on just how this is due solely to the working of special institutions. Commonplace thinking often has the impression that force holds the state together, but in fact its only bond is the fundamental sense of order which everybody possesses. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

History as the slaughter-bench — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Philosophy must indeed recognize the possibility that the people rise to it, but must not lower itself to the people. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The essence of the modern state is that the universal be bound up with the complete freedom of its particular members and with private well-being, that thus the interests of family and civil society must concentrate themselves on the state. It is only when both these moments subsist in their strength that the state can be regarded as articulated and genuinely organized. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as it is to fancy that an individual can overleap his own age, jump over Rhodes. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

God is the absolute truth — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

It is because the method of physics does not satisfy the comprehension that we have to go on further. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Children are potentially free and their life directly embodies nothing save potential freedom. Consequently they are not things and cannot be the property either of their parents or others. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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 — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Destiny is consciousness of oneself, but consciousness of oneself as an enemy. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The important question of how poverty can be remedied is one which agitates and torments modern societies especially — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Because of its concrete content, sense-certainty immediately appears as the richest kind of knowledge, indeed a knowledge of infinite wealth for which no bounds can be found, either when we reach out into space and time in which it is dispersed, or when we take a bit of this wealth, and by division enter into it. Moreover, sense-certainty appears to be the truest knowledge ... but, in the event, this very certainty proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth. All that it says about what it knows is just that it is; and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

I'm not ugly, but my beauty is a total creation. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

World history is a court of judgment — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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 — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The real is the rational and the rational is the real. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Life has value only when it has something valuable as its object. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In the case of various kinds of knowledge, we find that what in former days occupied the energies of men of mature mental ability sinks to the level of information, exercises, and even pastimes for children; and in this educational progress we can see the history of the world's culture delineated in faint outline. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The Few assume to be the deputies, but they are often only the despoilers of the Many. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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

Too fair to worship, too divine to love. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The true is thus the bacchanalian whirl in which no member is not drunken; and because each, as soon as it detaches itself, dissolves immediately - the whirl is just as much transparent and simple repose. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain
that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole spring of actions. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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 — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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

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! — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Each consciousness seeks the death of the other. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Art is the sensuous presentation of ideas. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

On the stage on which we are observing it, - Universal History - Spirit displays itself in its most concrete reality. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The State is the Divine idea as it exists on Earth. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The more certain our knowledge the less we know. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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

When we look at the world rationally, the world looks rationally back. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Every idea, extended into infinity, becomes its own opposite. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The Catholics had been in the position of oppressors, and the Protestants of the oppressed — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

I have the courage to be mistaken. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

History in general is therefore the development of Spirit in Time, as Nature is the development of the Idea is Space. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

One more word about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed ...
When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

If you want to love you must serve, if you want freedom you must die. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

[T]he 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 — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

crowd of frenzied females, — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The one who merely flees is not yet free. In fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The life of God - the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things - may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State ... For Truth is the unity of the universal and subjective will; and the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth. We have in it, therefore, the object of history in a more definite shape than before; that in which Freedom obtains objectivity. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Nothing great has been and nothing great can be accomplished without passion. It is only a dead, too often, indeed, a hypocriticalmoralizing which inveighs against the form of passion as such. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The evident character of this defective cognition of which mathematics is proud, and on which it plumes itself before philosophy, rests solely on the poverty of its purpose and the defectiveness of its stuff, and is therefore of a kind that philosophy must spurn — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Beauty and art pervade all the business of life like a kindly genius, brightly adorning our surroundings whether interior or exterior, mitigating the seriousness of existence and the complexities of the real life, extinguishing idleness in an entertaining fashion, and, where there is nothing good to be achieved, filling the place of vice better than vice itself. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The beginning of religion, more precisely its content, is the concept of religion itself, that God is the absolute truth, the truth of all things, and subjectively that religion alone is the absolutely true knoweldge. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Whatever is reasonable is true, and whatever is true is reasonable — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The true is the whole. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Every consciousness pursues the death of the other. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

History is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The heart is everywhere, and each part of the organism is only the specialized force of the heart itself. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel