Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.
To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual.
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.
Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.
It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value.
All that is real is reasonable, and all that is reasonable is real.
Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help.
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.
The Few assume to be the deputies, but they are often only the despoilers of the Many.
An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.
Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.Collection: Two
To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.Collection: Success
To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them.Collection: Limitation
We learn from history that we do not learn from historyCollection: Wisdom
What history teaches us is that neither nations nor governments ever learn anything from it.Collection: Government
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.Collection: Struggle
If you want to love you must serve, if you want freedom you must die.Collection: Love
The valor that struggles is better than the weakness that endures.Collection: Courage
I have the courage to be mistaken.Collection: Mistaken
War is progress, peace is stagnation.Collection: War
Africa has no history and did not contribute to anything that mankind enjoyed.Collection: Racist
The more certain our knowledge the less we know.Collection: Certain
Every idea, extended into infinity, becomes its own opposite.Collection: Life
God is, as it were, the sewer into which all contradictions flow.Collection: God
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.Collection: Love
The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.Collection: Fall
Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand meCollection: Philosophical
Life has value only when it has something valuable as its object.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Mean
No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is a valet.Collection: Hero
Reading the morning newspaper is the realist's morning . One orients one's attitude toward the either by or by what the world is. The former gives as much security as the latter, in that one knows how one stands.Collection: Morning
The real is the rational and the rational is the real.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Children
The person must give himself an external sphere of freedom in order to have being as Idea.Collection: Order
In duty the individual acquires his substantive freedomCollection: Individual
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 requisiteCollection: Philosophy
When needs and means become abstract in quality, abstraction is also a character of the reciprocal relation of individuals to oneanother. This abstract character, universality, is the character of being recognized and is the moment which makes concrete, i.e. social, the isolated and abstract needs and their ways and means of satisfaction.Collection: Character
What experience and history teach is this - that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on any lessons they might have drawn from it. Variant: What experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.Collection: Government
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.Collection: Spring
...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.Collection: Fear
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.Collection: Art
In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain -- that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Intelligent
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.Collection: Passion
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.Collection: Philosophy
Philosophy must indeed recognize the possibility that the people rise to it, but must not lower itself to the people.Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Freedom
On the stage on which we are observing it, — Universal History — Spirit displays itself in its most concrete reality.Collection: Reality