Hegel Quotes
Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help. It is useless to revert to similar circumstances in the Past. The pallid shades of memory struggle in vain with the life and freedom of the Present.
Hegel
(Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 1821 - 1831)
The true is the whole.
World history is a court of judgment.
Education is the art of making man ethical.
What is reasonable is real; that which is real is reasonable.
The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in everything.
The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself.
Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature.
Into all that becomes something inward for men, an image or conception as such, into all that he makes his own, language has penetrated ... logic must certainly be said to be the supernatural element which permeates every relationship of man to nature, his sensation, intuition, desire, need, instinct, and simply by so doing transforms it into something human, even though only formally human, into ideas and purposes.
Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.
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.
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.
The great thing however is, in the show of the temporal and the transient to recognize the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present..
Hegel
(Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 1820)
The heart-throb for the welfare of humanity therefore passes into the ravings of an insane self-conceit, into the fury of consciousness to preserve itself from destruction; and it does this by expelling from itself the perversion which it is itself, and by striving to look on it and express it as something else.
Religion cannot be seperate from a believer's existence and life, but, on the contrary, it breathes its influence over all his feelings and actions.
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 comprehend what is, is the task of philosophy: and what is is Reason.
Discord which appears at first to be a lamentable breach and dissolution of the unity of a party, is really the crowning proof of its success.
Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.
All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner.
Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts.
It must be observed at the outset, that the phenomenon we investigate - Universal History - belongs to the realm of Spirit. The term "World," includes both physical and psychical Nature.
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.
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.
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.
The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.
What experience and history teach is this: that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.
Variant: What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.
The animal cannot mutilate or kill itself, but a human being can. Animals do in a manner possess themselves. Their soul is in possession of their body. But they have no right to their life, because they do not will it.
It is a matter of perfect indifference where a thing originated; the only question is: "Is it true in and for itself?"
Philosophy cannot teach the state what it should be, but only how it, the ethical universe, is to be known.
To him who looks at the world rationally the world looks rationally back.
Variant:
To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual.
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.
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.
Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.
Variant: We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion.
An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.
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.
But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself...
The goal to be reached is the mind’s insight into what knowing is. 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... Because by nothing less could that all-pervading mind ever manage to become conscious of what itself is - for that reason, the individual mind, in the nature of the case, cannot expect by less toil to grasp what its own substance contains.
One word more about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed.... When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.
What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational. On this conviction the plain man like the philosopher takes his stand, and from it philosophy starts in its study of the universe of spirit as well as the universe of nature. If reflection, feeling, or whatever form subjective consciousness may take, looks upon the present as something vacuous and looks beyond it with the eyes of superior wisdom, it finds itself in a vacuum, and because it is actual only in the present, it is itself mere vacuity. If on the other hand the Idea passes for 'only an Idea', for something represented in an opinion, philosophy rejects such a view and shows that nothing is actual except the Idea.
Conscience ... lacks the power to externalize itself, the power to make itself into a Thing, and to endure being. It lives in dread of besmirching the splendour of its inner being by action and an existence; and in order to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with the actual world, and persists in its self-willed impotence to renounce its self which is reduced to the extreme of ultimate abstraction, and to give itself a substantial existence, or to transform its thought into being.... Its activity is a yearning which merely loses itself as consciousness becomes an object devoid of substance, and, rising above this loss, and falling back on itself, finds itself only as a lost soul. In this transparent purity of its moments, an unhappy, so-called 'beautiful soul,' its light dies away within it, and it vanishes like a shapeless vapour that dissolves into thin air.
The want of sound sense which marks the arguments advanced against philosophy knows no bounds. The very opinions which are supposed by those who hold them to militate against philosophy, and to be in the sharpest antagonism to it, upon examination of their content exhibit essential agreement with that which they combat. Thus the result of the study of philosophy is that these walls of separation, which are supposed to divide absolutely, become transparent; and that when we go to the root of things we find that there is absolute accordance where it was believed that there was the greatest opposition.
The life of God - the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things - may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things.
Meanwhile, if the fear of falling into error sets up a mistrust of Science, which in the absence of such scruples gets on with the work itself, and actually cognizes something, it is hard to see why we should not turn round and mistrust this very mistrust.... What calls itself fear of error reveals itself rather as fear of the truth.
