Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes

To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them.

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

To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.

We learn from history that we do not learn from history

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

Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.

What history teaches us is that neither nations nor governments ever learn anything from it.

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

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.

If you want to love you must serve, if you want freedom you must die.

Africa has no history and did not contribute to anything that mankind enjoyed.

I have the courage to be mistaken.

War is progress, peace is stagnation.

The more certain our knowledge the less we know.

Every idea, extended into infinity, becomes its own opposite.

Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself.

God is, as it were, the sewer into which all contradictions flow.

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.

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

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

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

Science and knowledge, especially that of philosophy, came from the Arabs into the West.

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.

Life has value only when it has something valuable as its object.

To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality.