Top 68 Hegel Quotes & Sayings

I am still moved by passages of Marx: the 'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,' for example, where, after the famous line about religion being 'the opium of the people,' he goes on to call it 'the heart of a heartless world.'

As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.

As Hegel well knew, the ascent of reason has never followed a straight line.

Most "process" philosophy is historicist (e.g., Hegel) and not concerned with "deep time." Maybe Whitehead is an exception. He may be a really important philosopher for all I know. I've never been able to read him.

That Hegel is a metaphysician, and that he thinks metaphysics is fundamental to philosophy, is plain enough from his definition of philosophy.

Georg Hegel viewed the "great men" as instruments of something far greater. Hegel believes that an individual can indeed embody the zeitgeist for a moment, but also that the individual isn't always clear they are doing so.

Well, I don’t know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I’m no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much.

Hegel's theory of recognition is basically derived from Fichte, who is its real author.

An abiding and central concern of philosophy and religion alike is the fear that the world is alien to human beings, that nature is, in Hegel's words, 'out and out other' to 'spirit'. It's easy enough to see how 'constructivist' or 'humanist' conceptions are efforts to dispel this fear.

The problems of human subjectivity replicate themselves at many different scales, like the overtones and undertones in a stringed instrument striking ghost-intervals up and down into infinity. This is not Hegel's ingenuity, it is his responsiveness to the organic structure in us that echoes itself throughout the whole architecture.

Berkeley , Hume, Kant , Fichte , Hegel , James , Bergson all are united in one earnest attempt, the attempt to reinstate man with his high spiritual claims in a place of importance in the cosmic scheme.

Fichte is a necessary step to both Hegel and Marx.

Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don't see any way of getting beyond those prophecies.

H.P.Lovecraft could've been trying to do a Marx to Hegel, that kind of thing, in other words, turn the thing upside down and crawl around inside it. But, look, the guy was eating poorly, he had like a quart of ice cream a day. He was suffering constantly near the end. He wasn't concerned with his body at all, not the way we're concerned with our bodies nowadays.

Unlike Hegel's progress model of history, which moves by stages, each containing its own logic of growth and decline, the economic model develops as the simple function of one money-variable over time, with a long-term trend which increases monotonically.

There is more to be learnt from every page of David Hume than from the collected philosophical works of Hegel, Herbart, and Schleiermacher are taken together.

Summertime, and the reading is easy... Well, maybe not easy, exactly, but July and August are hardly the months to start working your way through the works of Germanic philosophers. Save Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl for the bleaker days of February.

Hegel's philosophy is so odd that one would not have expected him to be able to get sane men to accept it, but he did. He set it out with so much obscurity that people thought it must be profound. It can quite easily be expounded lucidly in words of one syllable, but then its absurdity becomes obvious.

Hegel understood the Heisenbergian reality of knowing: yes, it would be nice if we could somehow delicately capture the truth and bring it closer to ourselves without altering it, "like a bird caught with a limestick." But the reality is, every truth we manage to know is altered, deformed by our very "encheiresis naturae," by the act of our taking-in-hand of nature (to borrow the alchemists' phrase from Goethe's Faust).

Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.

Well, I don't know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I'm no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much.

I never think in terms of alienation; it's the others who do. Alienation means one thing to Hegel, another to Marx and yet another to Freud; so it is not possible to give a single definition, one that will exhaust the subject. It is a question bordering on philosophy, and I'm not a philosopher nor a sociologist. My business is to tell stories, to narrate with images - nothing else. If I do make films about alienation - to use that word that is so ambiguous - they are about characters, not about me.

I'm so smart, I read and understand Hegel

To go straight to the deepest depth, I went for Hegel; what unclear thoughtless flow of words I was to find there! My unlucky star led me from Hegel to Schopenhauer . . . Even in Kant there were many things that I could grasp so little that given his general acuity of mind I almost suspected that he was pulling the reader's leg or was even an imposter.

History is one long chain of reflections. Hegel also indicated certain rules that apply for this chain of reflections. Anyone studying history in depth will observe that a thought is usually proposed on the basis of other, previously proposed thoughts. But as soon as one thought is proposed, it will be contradicted by another. A tension arises between these two opposite ways of thinking. But the tension is resolved by the proposal of a third thought which accommodates the best of both points of view. Hegel calls this a dialectic process

Since substance is infinite, the universe as a whole, i.e., god, Hegel is telling us that philosophy is knowledge of the infinite, of the universe as a whole, i.e, god. You cannot get more metaphysical than that. I think that Hegel scholars have to admit this basic fact rather than burying their heads in the sand and trying to pretend that Hegel is concerned with conceptual analysis, category theory, normativity or some such contemporary fad.

For my own part, I abandon the ethics of duty to the Hegelian critique with no regrets; it would appear to me, indeed, to have been correctly characterized by Hegel as an abstract thought, as a thought of understanding.

Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.

The Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.

Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different. I was thinking of using as a motto for my book a quotation from King Lear: 'I’ll teach you differences'. ... 'You’d be surprised' wouldn’t be a bad motto either.

Think of me as an impetuous Hegel, drunk with power, and also, regular drunk.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Hegel said that `truth` is subjective, thus rejecting the existence of any `truth` above or beyond human reason. All knowledge is human knowledge.

To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs -- but a tribute nevertheless.

Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.

The auspices for philosophy are bad if, when proceeding ostensibly on the investigation of truth, we start saying farewell to all uprightness, honesty and sincerity, and are intent only on passing ourselves off for what we are not. We then assume, like those three sophists [Fichte, Schelling and Hegel], first a false pathos, then an affected and lofty earnestness, then an air of infinite superiority, in order to impose where we despair of ever being able to convince.

Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that men never learn anything from history.

As Karl Marx once noted: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial was a tragedy. The creationists and intelligent design theorists are a farce.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

The word change, so dear to our Europe, has been given a new meaning: it no longer means a new stage of coherent development (as it was understood by Vico, Hegel or Marx), but a shift from one side to another, from front to back, from the back to the left, from the left to the front (as understood by designers dreaming up the fashion for the next season).

There's a sense in which Marx does contribute to the fund of human knowledge, and we can no more dismiss him than we can [George] Hegel or [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau or [Baruch] Spinoza or [Charles] Darwin; you don't have to be a Darwinian to appreciate Darwin's views, and I don't have to be a Marxist to appreciate what is valid in a number of [Karl] Marx's writings-and Marx would call that a form of simple commodity production rather than capitalism.

The fact is that philosophy has been a decisive source of inspiration in all the great crises that Europe has faced. It has been so in the time that preceded the fall of the Roman Empire, when Augustine of Hippo delineated the features of a new spiritual civilization; in the age of religious wars, when Descartes and Hobbes established the principles of modern science and politics; and at the turn of the French Revolution, interpreted by Kant and Hegel as an event destined to change the history of the world.

[T]ruly to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that which permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.

Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I knew people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view.

Protestantism, of course, is much more explicitly divided into different traditions - the Pentecostals, the Anglicans. But there is the main tradition of Protestantism that comes out of the Reformation and that produced people like Kant and Hegel and so on, who are not normally thought of as being people writing in a theological tradition, although Hegel, of course, wrote theology his whole life.

To a society that inarticulately and thoughtlessly takes itself to be divine, Hegel says, Yes, we are indeed divine, and philosophy can show how this is both possible and necessary.

Contemporary philosophy illustrates Hegel's dictum that philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought, for in our age philosophy yields to the objectifying technical impulse and loses its ancient task of pursuing the Socratic ideal of the wisdom of the examined life.

When Hegel later became a man of influence' he insisted that the Jews should be granted equal rights because civic rights belong to man because he is a man and not on account of his ethnic origins or his religion.

That Hegel's theory is derivative from Fichte's does not prevent it from being strikingly original and of independent value.

Surely the world will be a better place, at least marginally, if people have a better understanding of Kant and Hegel, if Marx's thought its studied and appreciated, if people gain a better understanding of Fichte, whose philosophy is far more important than people realize.

My personal view is that such total planning by the state is an absolute good and not simply a relative good... I do not myself think of the attitude I take as deriving from Marx - though this undoubtedly will be suggested - but from Fichte and Hegel.

It was also Hegel who established the view that the different philosophic systems that we find in history are to be comprehended in terms of development and that they are generally one-sided because they owe their origins to a reaction against what has gone before.

Hegel held that the two sexes were of necessity different, the one being active and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one.

The man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually wonder (and worship), were he President of innumerable Royal Societies, and carried the whole Mecanique Celeste and Hegel's Philosophy, and the epitome of all Laboratories and Observatories with their results, in his single head, is but a Pair of Spectacles behind which there is no Eye. Let those who have Eyes look through him, then he may be useful.

Hegel remains of great importance to understand ourselves, but essentially because we have all grown out of a reaction against Hegel.

At the present moment, the security of coherent philosophy, which existed from Parmenides to Hegel, is lost.

As a cultural-intellectual power and a moral ideal, collectivism died in World War II. If we are still rolling in its direction, it is only by the inertia of a void and the momentum of disintegration. A social movement that began with the ponderous, brain-cracking, dialectical constructs of Hegel and Marx, and ends up with a horde of morally unwashed children stamping their foot and shrieking: "I want it now is through."

The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and so they struggled by all conceptual means to avoid it.

Thinking is the subtlest form of self-polemics, the art of a certain finesse in psychological self-vivisection and self-crucifixion (Hegel of course called the path of self-disillusion the via dolorosa or "highway of despair," in Baillie's fine and florid rendering, like Jesus' route to Golgotha).