Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes

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

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Not only must philosophy be in agreement with our empirical knowledge of Nature, but the origin and formation of the Philosophy of Nature presupposes and is conditioned by empirical physics. However, the course of a science's origin and the preliminaries of its construction are one thing, while the science itself is another. In the latter, the former can no longer appear as the foundation of the science; here, the foundation must be the necessity of the Concept.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
In the fulfillment of both the laws and duty, … the moral disposition ceases to be the universal, opposed to inclination, and inclination ceases to be particular, opposed to the law.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
It is easier to perceive the shortcomings of individuals, states, and the course of world affairs than to understand their true impact.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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.

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
This is Bruno's fundamental idea. He says: "To recognize this unity of form and matter in all things, is what reason is striving to attain to. But in order to penetrate to this unity, in order to investigate all the secrets of Nature, we must search into the opposed and contradictory extremes of things, the maximum and the minimum"

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
A philosophy without heart and a faith without intellect are abstractions from the true life of knowledge and faith. The man whom philosophy leaves cold, and the man whom real faith does not illuminate, may be assured that the fault lies in them, not in knowledge and faith. The former is still an alien to philosophy, the latter an alien to faith.

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

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

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Science and knowledge, especially that of philosophy, came from the Arabs into the West.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The essence of the modern state is the union of the universal with the full freedom of the particular, and with the welfare of individuals.

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
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
History, is a conscious, self-meditating process — Spirit emptied out into Time; but this externalization, this kenosis, is equally an externalization of itself; the negative is the negative of itself.... Thus absorbed in itself, it is sunk in the night of its self-consciousness; but in that night its vanished outer existence is perserved, and this transformed existence — the former one, but now reborn of the Spirit's knowledge — is the new existence, a new world and a new shape of Spirit.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey on 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
Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The science of religion is one science within philosophy; indeed it is the final one. In that respect it presupposes the other philosophical disciplines and is therefore a result.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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.

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
To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual.

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

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
To him who looks at the world rationally the world looks rationally back.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
We do not need to be shoemakers to know if our shoes fit, and just as little have we any need to be professionals to acquire knowledge of matters of universal interest.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
It is a matter of perfect indifference where a thing originated; the only question is: "Is it true in and for itself?" Many think that by pronouncing a doctrine to be Neo-Platonic, they have ipso facto banished it from Christianity. Whether a Christian doctrine stands exactly thus or thus in the Bible, the point to which the exegetical scholars of modern times devote all their attention is not the only question. The Letter kills, the Spirit makes alive: this they say themselves, yet pervert the sentiment by taking the Understanding for the Spirit.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The heart-throb for the welfare of humanity therefore passes into the ravings of an insane self-conceit, into the fury of consciousness to preserve itself from destruction; and it does this by expelling from itself the perversion which it is itself, and by striving to look on it and express it as something else.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel