Top 154 Quotes & Sayings by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.

The Few assume to be the deputies, but they are often only the despoilers of the Many.

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

All that is real is reasonable, and all that is reasonable is real.

Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.

World history is a court of judgment.

Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature.

I'm not ugly, but my beauty is a total creation.

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

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

Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help.

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

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

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.

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

It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value.

Too fair to worship, too divine to love.

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

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.

Education is the art of making man ethical.

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.

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

Genuine tragedy is a case not of right against wrong but of right against right - two equally justified ethical principles embodied in people of unchangeable will.

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

The history of the world is none other than the progress of the , consciousness of freedom.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

In a true tragedy, both parties must be right.

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.

Before the end of Time will be the end of History. Before the end of History will be the end of Art.

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.

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

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.

War is progress, peace is stagnation.

We learn from history that we do not learn from history

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

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

The more certain our knowledge the less we know.

The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself.

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

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.

The true is the whole.

A man who has work that suits him and a wife, whom he loves, has squared his accounts with life.

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.

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

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

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

I have the courage to be mistaken.

We must have a new mythology, but it must place itself at the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason. Mythology must become philosophical, so that the people may become rational, and philosophy must become mythological, so that philosophers may become sensible. If we do not give ideas a form that is aesthetic, i.e., mythological, they will hold no interest for people.

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

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.

Beauty is merely the Spiritual making itself known sensuously.

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

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

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

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.