Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes - Page 3

As high as mind stands above nature, so high does the state stand above physical life. Man must therefore venerate the state as a secular deity.

Too fair to worship, too divine to love.

The courage of the truth is the first condition of philosophic study.

In a true tragedy, both parties must be right.

Reading the morning newspaper is the realist's morning prayer.

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.

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.

The proofs of the existence of God are to such an extent fallen into discredit that they pass for something antiquated, belonging to days gone by.

Destiny is consciousness of oneself, but consciousness of oneself as an enemy.

We learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle rounded and complete in itself. In each of these parts, however, the philosophical Idea is found in a particular specificality or medium. The single circle, because it is a real totality, bursts through the limits imposed by its special medium, and gives rise to a wider circle. The whole of philosophy in this way resembles a circle of circles. The Idea appears in each single circle, but, at the same time, the whole Idea is constituted by the system of these peculiar phases, and each is a necessary member of the organisation.

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.

The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony--periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.

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.

What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational

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.

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.

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.

The sublime in art is the attempt to express the infinite without finding in the realm of phenomena any object which proves itself fitting for this representation.

World history is a court of judgment.

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.

The substance, the essence, the Spirit is freedom.

The people are that part of the state that does not know what it wants.

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.