Top 100 Hegel's 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. The Communists , following Hegel , speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.
Simone De Beauvoir
#4. 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
#5. 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.
Harold Bloom
#6. 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.
Karl Marx
#7. Hegel remains of great importance to understand ourselves, but essentially because we have all grown out of a reaction against Hegel.
Frederick C. Beiser
#8. Hegel on sacrifice. The animal dies. The man becomes alert.
Anne Carson
#10. Philosophy must indeed recognize the possibility that the people rise to it, but must not lower itself to the people.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. . . . the abandonment of metaphysics involves more than the redefinition of the nature of rational inquiry in accordance with the tenets of modern scientific methodology; this redefinition itself makes matters of value and validity mere matters of opinion.
Alan White
#15. We are condemned to repeat the past whether we remember it or not. It is inevitable; just ask Nietzsche (eternal return) or Hegel (history repeats itself) or James McCourt (history repeats itself like hiccups). Beirutis
Rabih Alameddine
#17. But as Hegel teaches us, beginnings are necessarily problematic. (As are endings.) How can I describe my first encounter with Ana fairly, when my understanding of her essence has passed through infinite iterations over the past four and a half years? My
Alena Graedon
#18. 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.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#19. 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
#20. 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
#22. 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
#24. If Hegel had written the whole of his Logic and in the Preface disclosed the fact that it was only a thought-experiment (in which however at many points he had steered clear of many things), he would have been the greatest thinker who ever lived. As it is, he is merely comic.
Soren Kierkegaard
#26. 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
#27. Hegel believed that the basis of human cognition changed from one generation to the next. There were therefore no 'eternal truths', no timeless reason. The only fixed point philosophy can hold on to is history itself.
Jostein Gaarder
#28. 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.
George Steiner
#31. To put the point facetiously, one could say that Hegel began his career a Marxist and later became a Hegelian.
Michael N. Forster
#32. 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.
Frederick C. Beiser
#33. 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
#34. 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
#36. 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
#38. 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
#39. When one begins to philosophize one must be first a Spinozist. The soul must bathe itself in the aether of this single substance, in
which everything one has held dear is submerged.
Hegel G W F
#40. Hegel believed that progress is ultimately furthered by the person who is out of step with the majority. Only this person, the genuine nonconformist, really experiences the constraints on freedom. Only this person is in the position of questioning the prevailing understandings of happiness. For
Stephen Eric Bronner
#41. 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.
Roger Penrose
#42. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#52. 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
#53. It's exciting to hear them talking about poetry and science and philosophy - about Shakespeare and Milton; Newton and Einstein and Freud; about Plato and Hegel and Kant, and all the other names that echo like great church bells in my mind.
Daniel Keyes
#54. 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.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#57. Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#58. 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
#59. 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.
Walter Kaufmann
#60. Reason is just as cunning as she is powerful. Her cunning consists principally in her mediating activity, which, by causing objects to act and re-act on each other in accordance with their own nature, in this way, without any direct interference in the process, carries out reason's intentions.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#61. The true is thus the bacchanalian whirl in which no member is not drunken; and because each, as soon as it detaches itself, dissolves immediately - the whirl is just as much transparent and simple repose.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#63. 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
#65. When I was young, most teachers of philosophy in British and American universities were Hegelians, so that, until I read Hegel, I supposed there must be some truth to his system; I was cured, however, by discovering that everything he said on the philosophy of mathematics was plain nonsense.
Bertrand Russell
#67. 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.
John Grierson
#68. The political movements, or ideologies, inspired by Hegel are all united in
the ostensible abandonment of virtue.
Albert Camus
#69. 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
#71. 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.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#72. In the words of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, "Human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds.
Alena Graedon
#74. The beginning of religion, more precisely its content, is the concept of religion itself, that God is the absolute truth, the truth of all things, and subjectively that religion alone is the absolutely true knoweldge.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#75. 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.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#77. Nothing great in this world has ever been accomplished without passion" Hegel
Herve Lebret
#78. Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#80. In every page of David Hume, there is more to be learned than from Hegel's, Herbart's and Schleiermacher's complete philosophical works.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#81. People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger in abstraction, and their light dies away.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#82. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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.
Paul Ricoeur
#88. 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
#89. 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).
Kenny Smith
#90. The conversations were miles beyond Jo's comprehension, but she enjoyed it, though Kant and Hegel were unknown gods, the Subjective and Objective unintelligible terms, and the only thing 'evolved from her inner consciousness' was a bad headache after it was all over.
Louisa May Alcott
#91. 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
#92. 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.
John Carroll
#93. Hegel said that 'truth' is subjective, thus rejecting the existence of any 'truth' above or beyond human reason. All knowledge is human knowledge.
Jostein Gaarder
#94. Trying to attack Hegel's ideas from the inside is like trying to loosen the hangman's rope by tugging at the noose.
Nigel Hems
#95. Hegel's philosophy is very difficult - he is, I should say, the hardest to understand of all the great philosophers. Before entering on any detail, a general characterization may prove helpful.
Bertrand Russell
#96. G.W.F. Hegel. "He's perfect," Weishaupt wrote ... "Unlike Kant, who makes sense only in German, this man doesn't make sense in any language.
Robert Anton Wilson
#97. Hegel used to say that the familiar, precisely because it is familiar, remains unknown. That's why we don't know so much about stupidity.
Carl William Brown
#98. Even if (as I myself believe) almost all Hegel's doctrines are false, he still retains an importance which is not merely historical, as the best representative of a certain kind of philosophy which, in others, is less coherent and less comprehensive.
Bertrand Russell
#99. 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.
Donald Phillip Verene
#100. Marx inverted Hegel's dialectics and stood it right side up, on its feet.
David Harvey