Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes

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Between the Shaman of the Tungus, the European prelate who rules church and state, the Voguls, and the Puritans, on the one hand, and the man who listens to his own command of duty, on the other, the difference is not that the former make themselves slaves, while the latter is free, but that the former have their lord outside themselves, while the latter carries his lord in himself, yet at the same time is his own slave.

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
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
Any idea is a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize something means to think it.

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
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
Serious occupation is labor that has reference to some want.

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
The inclination to act as the laws command, a virtue, is a synthesis in which the law … loses its universality and the subject its particularity; both lose their opposition, while in the Kantian conception of virtue this opposition remains, and the universal becomes the master and the particular the mastered.

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

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The person must give himself an external sphere of freedom in order to have being as Idea.

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
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
The external embodiment of an act is composed of many parts, and may be regarded as capable of being divided into an infinite number of particulars. An act may be looked on as in the first instance coming into contact with only one of these particulars. But the truth of the particular is the universal. A definite act is not confined in its content to one isolated point of the varied external world, but is universal, including these varied relations within itself. The purpose, which is the product of thought and embraces not the particular only but also the universal side, is intention.

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
When reflection, feeling, or whatever other form the subjective consciousness may assume, regards the present as vanity, and thinks itself to be beyond it and wiser, it finds itself in emptiness, and, as it has actuality only in the present, it is vanity throughout. Against the doctrine that the idea is a mere idea, figment or opinion, philosophy preserves the more profound view that nothing is real except the idea.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
What Jesus reveals is not that laws disappear but that they must be kept through righteousness of a new kind, … which is more complete because it supplements the deficiency in the laws. … This expanded content we may call an inclination so to act as the laws may command, i. e., a unification of inclination with the law whereby the latter loses its form as law. This correspondence with inclination is the πληρωμα [fulfillment] of the law.

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
The owl of Minerva first begins her flight with the onset of dusk.

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

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The Philosophy of Nature takes up the material, prepared for it by physics out of experience, at the point to which physics has brought it, and again transforms it, without basing it ultimately on the authority of experience. Physics therefore must work into the hands of philosophy, so that the latter may translate into a true comprehension (Begriff) the abstract universal transmitted to it, showing how it issues from that comprehension as an intrinsically necessary whole.

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

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
In history, we are concerned with what has been and what is; in philosophy, however, we are concerned not with what belongs exclusively to the past or to the future, but with that which is, both now and eternally — in short, with reason.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality. Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The destiny of the spiritual World, and, — since this is the substantial World, while the physical remains subordinate to it, or, in the language of speculation, has no truth as against the spiritual, — the final cause of the World at large, we allege to be the consciousness of its own freedom on the part of Spirit, and ipso facto, the reality of that freedom.

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
Poverty in itself does not make men into a rabble; a rabble is created only when there is joined to poverty a disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the rich, against society, against the government.

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