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

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Philosophy is its own time comprehended in thoughts.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Thus to be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great or rational whether in life or in science. Great achievement is assured, however, of subsequent recognition and grateful acceptance by public opinion, which in due course will make it one of its own prejudices.

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
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
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
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
The first remark we have to make, and which — though already presented more than once — cannot be too often repeated when the occasion seems to call for it, — is that what we call principle, aim, destiny, or the nature and idea of Spirit, is something merely general and abstract. Principle — Plan of Existence — Law — is a hidden, undeveloped essence, which as such — however true in itself — is not completely real.

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
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
The stars are not pulled this way and that by mechanical forces; theirs is a free motion. They go on their way, as the ancients said, like the blessed gods.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in providence, than to see their real import or value.

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
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
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
In the Soul is the awaking of Consciousness: Consciousness sets itself up as Reason, awaking at one bound to the sense of its rationality: and this Reason by its activity emancipates itself to objectivity and the consciousness of its intelligent unity.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The objects of philosophy, it is true, are upon the whole the same as those of religion. In both the object is Truth, in that supreme sense in which God and God only is the Truth.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Serious occupation is labor that has reference to some want.

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
The goal to be reached is the mind's insight into what knowing is. 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,... because by nothing less could that all-pervading mind ever manage to become conscious of what itself is — for that reason, the individual mind, in the nature of the case, cannot expect by less toil to grasp what its own substance contains.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The good is the idea, or unity of the conception of the will with the particular will. Abstract right, well-being, the subjectivity of consciousness, and the contingency of external reality, are in their independent and separate existences superseded in this unity, although in their real essence they are contained in it and preserved. This unity is realized freedom, the absolute final cause of the world.

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
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.

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