Top 100 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes
#1. The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole spring of actions.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#3. 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.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#4. Philosophy must indeed recognize the possibility that the people rise to it, but must not lower itself to the people.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#6. History is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#7. The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and the Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third, Monarchy.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#9. When Philosophy with its abstractions paints grey in grey, the freshness and life of youth has gone, the reconciliation is not a reconciliation in the actual, but in the ideal world.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#10. It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#12. 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
#14. Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as it is to fancy that an individual can overleap his own age, jump over Rhodes.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#17. When a father inquired about the best method of educating his son in ethical conduct, a Pythagorean replied: Make him a citizen of a state with good laws
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#18. By means of the simple folk remedy of ascribing to feeling what is the millennia-long labor of reason and of its understanding, all are spared the bother of rational insight and knowledge.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#19. The State is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#20. 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
#21. History in general is therefore the development of Spirit in Time, as Nature is the development of the Idea is Space.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#22. Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#23. The state of man's mind, or the elementary phase of mind which he so far possesses, conforms precisely to the state of the world as he so far views it
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#24. 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.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#28. Children are potentially free and their life directly embodies nothing save potential freedom. Consequently they are not things and cannot be the property either of their parents or others.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#31. It strikes everyone in beginning to form an acquaintance with the treasures of Indian literature that a land so rich in intellectual products and those of the profoundest order of thought.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#33. Only by resolving can a human being step into actuality, however bitter this may be to him. Inertia lacks the will to abandon the inward brooding which allows it to retain everything as as a possibility. But possibility is not yet actuality.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#34. 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
#37. Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#39. People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger in abstraction, and their light dies away.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#40. To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#43. What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#44. It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#48. 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.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#49. The true courage of civilized nations is readiness for sacrifice in the service of the state, so that the individual counts as only one amongst many. The important thing here is not personal mettle but aligning oneself with the universal.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#51. The people will learn to feel the dignity of man. They will not merely demand their rights, which have been trampled in the dust, but themselves will take them - make them their own.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#52. Nothing great has been and nothing great can be accomplished without passion. It is only a dead, too often, indeed, a hypocriticalmoralizing which inveighs against the form of passion as such.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#56. In the Soul is the awaking of Consciousness: Consciousness sets itself up as Reason, awaking at one bound to the sense of its rationality: and this Reason by its activity emancipates itself to objectivity and the consciousness of its intelligent unity.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#59. 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
#60. 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.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#61. Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#64. The only Thought which Philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of History, is the simple conception of Reason; that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#66. 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.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#71. 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
#72. 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 march of God in the world, that is what the State is.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#82. 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
#83. The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#85. The evident character of this defective cognition of which mathematics is proud, and on which it plumes itself before philosophy, rests solely on the poverty of its purpose and the defectiveness of its stuff, and is therefore of a kind that philosophy must spurn
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#86. The nature of finite things is to have the seed of their passing-away as their essential being: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#89. It is hard to see why we should not turn round and mistrust this very mistrust. Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself?
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#90. But even regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimised - the question involuntarily arises - to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#91. 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
#94. It is a matter of perfect indifference where a thing originated; the only question is: Is it true in and for itself?
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#95. 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.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
