Top 140 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

2. “Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

3. “History teaches us that man learns nothing from history.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

4. “War is progress, peace is stagnation.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

5. “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

6. “Africa has no history and did not contribute to anything that makind enjoyed...”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

7. “God is the absolute truth.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

8. “Before the end of Time will be the end of History. Before the end of History will be the end of Art.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

9. “To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

10. “Education is the art of making man ethical.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

11. “Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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12. “To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

13. “An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

14. “Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

15. “The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in everything.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

16. “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

17. “Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

18. “The spirit is never at rest, but always engaged in progressive motion, giving itself new form.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

19. “History is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

20. “World history is a court of judgment.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

21. “The courage of the truth is the first condition of philosophic study.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

22. “Philosophy is the history of philosophy.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

23. “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

24. “Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

25. “If you want to love you must serve, if you want freedom you must die.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

26. “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

27. “The more certain our knowledge the less we know.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

28. “Life has value only when it has something valuable as its object.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

29. “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

30. “Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

31. “Whatever is reasonable is true, and whatever is true is reasonable.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

32. “The valor that struggles is better than the weakness that endures.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

33. “Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

34. “Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

35. “Philosophy must indeed recognize the possibility that the people rise to it, but must not lower itself to the people.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

36. “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

37. “The true is the whole.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

38. “Beauty is merely the Spiritual making itself known sensuously.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

39. “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

40. “The essence of the modern state is the union of the universal with the full freedom of the particular, and with the welfare of individuals.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

41. “To him who looks at the world rationally the world looks rationally back.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

42. “To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

43. “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

44. “No man is a hero to his valet de chamber.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

45. “The person must give himself an external sphere of freedom in order to have being as Idea.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

46. “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

47. “Destiny is consciousness of oneself, but consciousness of oneself as an enemy.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

48. “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

49. “People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger in abstraction, and their light dies away.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

50. “Every idea, extended into infinity, becomes its own opposite.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel