| Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two. | |
| We learn from history that we do not learn from history | |
| To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great. | |
| Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights. | |
| To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them. | |
| Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion. | |
| What history teaches us is that neither nations nor governments ever learn anything from it. | |
| 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 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. | |
| God is, as it were, the sewer into which all contradictions flow. | |
| War is progress, peace is stagnation. | |
| I have the courage to be mistaken. | |
| If you want to love you must serve, if you want freedom you must die. | |
| Africa has no history and did not contribute to anything that mankind enjoyed. | |
| Every idea, extended into infinity, becomes its own opposite. | |
| The valor that struggles is better than the weakness that endures. | |
| Science and knowledge, especially that of philosophy, came from the Arabs into the West. | |
| 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. | |
| The more certain our knowledge the less we know. | |
| In a true tragedy, both parties must be right. | |
| Before the end of Time will be the end of History. Before the end of History will be the end of Art. | |
| The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in everything. | |
| Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself. | |
| The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. | |
| An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think. | |
| Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought. | |
| Too fair to worship, too divine to love. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| Destiny is consciousness of oneself, but consciousness of oneself as an enemy. | |
| Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me | |
| The true is the whole. | |
| An individual piece only has meaning when it is seen as part of the whole. | |
| 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. | |
| History is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it. | |
| A man who has work that suits him and a wife, whom he loves, has squared his accounts with life. | |
| The history of the world is none other than the progress of the , consciousness of freedom. | |
| Beauty is merely the Spiritual making itself known sensuously. | |
| Life has value only when it has something valuable as its object. | |
| No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is a valet. | |
| All education is the art of making men ethical (sittlich), of transforming the old Adam into the new Adam. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality. | |
| India has created a special momentum in world history as a country to be searched for knowledge. | |
| 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 spirit is never at rest, but always engaged in progressive motion, giving itself new form. | |
| Reading the morning newspaper is the realist's morning prayer. | |
| God is the absolute truth... | |
| Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob. | |
| Whatever is reasonable is true, and whatever is true is reasonable | |
| We learn from history that man can never learn anything from history. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| The substance, the essence, the Spirit is freedom. | |
| The people are that part of the state that does not know what it wants. | |
| 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. | |
| Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way in which we deceive either ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account; with all its pros and cons, such knowing never gets anywhere, and it knows not why.... The analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, was, in fact, nothing else than ridding it of the form in which it had become familiar. | |
| 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. | |
| World history is a court of judgment. | |
| 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. | |
| Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond. | |
| People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger in abstraction, and their light dies away. | |
| Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it. | |
| What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational | |
| The courage of the truth is the first condition of philosophic study. | |
| 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. | |
| The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary. | |
| The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself. | |
| What the English call "comfortable" is something endless and inexhaustible. Every condition of comfort reveals in turn its discomfort, and these discoveries go on for ever. Hence the new want is not so much a want of those who have it directly, but is created by those who hope to make profit from it. | |
| 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. | |
| Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized--the question involuntarily arises--to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered. | |
| 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. | |
| The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant's existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. | |
| 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. | |
| For us, mind has nature for its premise, being nature's truth and for that reason its absolute prius. In this truth nature has vanished, and mind has resulted as the idea arrived at being-for-itself, the object of which, as well as the subject, is the concept. This identity is absolute negativity, for whereas in nature the concept has its perfect external objectivity, this its alienation has been superseded, and in this alienation the concept has become identical with itself. But it is this identity therefore, only in being a return out of nature. | |
| Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help. | |
| All the worth which the human being possesses all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State... For Truth is the Unity of the universal and subjective Will; and the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth. We have in it, therefore, the object of History in a more definite shape than before; that in which Freedom obtains objectivity... | |
| To him who looks at the world rationally the world looks rationally back. | |
| There are Plebes in all classes. | |
| 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 | |
| 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. | |
| Beauty and art pervade all the business of life like a kindly genius, brightly adorning our surroundings whether interior or exterior, mitigating the seriousness of existence and the complexities of the real life, extinguishing idleness in an entertaining fashion, and, where there is nothing good to be achieved, filling the place of vice better than vice itself. | |
| The Catholics had been in the position of oppressors, and the Protestants of the oppressed | |
| To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual. | |
| Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great or rational whether in life or in science. Great achievement is assured, however, of subsequent recognition and grateful acceptance by public opinion, which in due course will make it one of its own prejudices | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| The heart is everywhere, and each part of the organism is only the specialized force of the heart itself. | |
| Since philosophy is the exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the apprehension of the present and the actual, not the erection of a beyond, supposed to exist, God knows where, or rather which exists, and we can perfectly well say where, namely in the error of a one-sided, empty, ratiocination. | |
| It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| It is because the method of physics does not satisfy the comprehension that we have to go on further. | |
| 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. | |
| Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature. | |
| Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone. | |
| 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. | |
| Consequently, the sensuous aspect of art is related only to the two theoretical sensesof sight and hearing, while smell, taste, and touch remain excluded. | |
| Philosophy is the history of philosophy. | |
| It is a matter of perfect indifference where a thing originated; the only question is: Is it true in and for itself? | |
| Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions. | |
| The essence of the modern state is that the universal be bound up with the complete freedom of its particular members and with private well-being, that thus the interests of family and civil society must concentrate themselves on the state. It is only when both these moments subsist in their strength that the state can be regarded as articulated and genuinely organized. | |
| History in general is therefore the development of Spirit in Time, as Nature is the development of the Idea is Space. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| The State is the Divine idea as it exists on Earth. | |
| If we go on to cast a look at the fate of these World-Historical persons, whose vocation it was to be the agents of the World-Spirit, we shall find it to have been no happy one. They attained no calm enjoyment; their whole life was labour and trouble; their whole nature was nought else but their master�passion. When their object is attained they fall off like empty hulls from the kernel. They die early, like Alexander; they are murdered, like Caesar. | |
| In the case of various kinds of knowledge, we find that what in former days occupied the energies of men of mature mental ability sinks to the level of information, exercises, and even pastimes for children; and in this educational progress we can see the history of the world's culture delineated in faint outline. | |
| Everybody allows that to know any other science you must have first studied it, and that you can only claim to express a judgment upon it in virtue of such knowledge. Everybody allows that to make a shoe you must have learned and practised the craft of the shoemaker, though every man has a model in his own foot, and possesses in his hands the natural endowments for the operations required. For philosophy alone, it seems to be imagined, such study, care, and application are not in the least requisite | |
| Serious occupation is labor that has reference to some want. | |
| What is reasonable is real; that which is real is reasonable. | |
| History as the slaughter-bench | |
| 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 mind as well as the universe of nature. | |
| Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality. Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself. | |
| The real is the rational and the rational is the real. | |
| We assert then that nothing has been accomplished without interest on the part of the actors; and � if interest be called passion, inasmuch as the whole individuality, to the neglect of all other actual or possible interests and claims, is devoted to an object with every fibre of volition, concentrating all its desires and powers upon it � we may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion. | |
| ...if the fear of falling into error is the source of a mistrust in Science, which in the absence of any such misgivings gets on with the work itself and actually does know, it is difficult to see why, conversely, a mistrust should not be placed in this mistrust, and why we should not be concerned that this fear of erring is itself the very error. | |
| Philosophy must indeed recognize the possibility that the people rise to it, but must not lower itself to the people. | |
| 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. | |
| The Few assume to be the deputies, but they are often only the despoilers of the Many. | |
| 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. | |