Top 140 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Every idea, extended into infinity, becomes its own opposite.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

52. “The real is the rational and the rational is the real.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

53. “A man who has work that suits him and a wife, whom he loves, has squared his accounts with life.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

57. “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.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

58. “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.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

59. “The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

60. “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

61. “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

62. “History as the slaughter-bench.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

63. “The heart is everywhere, and each part of the organism is only the specialized force of the heart itself.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

64. “An individual piece only has meaning when it is seen as part of the whole.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

65. “In duty the individual acquires his substantive freedom.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

66. “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

67. “India has created a special momentum in world history as a country to be searched for knowledge.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

68. “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

69. “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

70. “Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

71. “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

72. “Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

73. “The State is the Divine idea as it exists on Earth.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

74. “I have the courage to be mistaken.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

75. “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.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

76. “Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

77. “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.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

78. “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

79. “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.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

80. “The people are that part of the state that does not know what it wants.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

81. “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.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

82. “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

83. “The evident character of this defective cognition of which mathematics is proud, and on which it plumes itself before philosophy, rests solely on the poverty of its purpose and the defectiveness of its stuff, and is therefore of a kind that philosophy must spurn.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

84. “It is a matter of perfect indifference where a thing originated; the only question is: Is it true in and for itself?”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

85. “The one who merely flees is not yet free. In fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

86. “On the stage on which we are observing it, – Universal History – Spirit displays itself in its most concrete reality.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

87. “Reading the morning newspaper is the realist’s morning prayer.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

88. “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

89. “God is, as it were, the sewer into which all contradictions flow.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

90. “Too fair to worship, too divine to love.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

91. “Each consciousness seeks the death of the other.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

92. “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

93. “The substance, the essence, the Spirit is freedom.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

94. “By Nature man is not what he ought to be; only through a transforming process does he arrive at truth.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

95. “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

96. “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.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

97. “Art does not simply reveal God: it is one of the ways in which God reveals, and thus actualizes, himself.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

98. “It is hard to see why we should not turn round and mistrust this very mistrust. Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself?”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

99. “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.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

100. “This Dialectic, which unsettles all particular judgments and opinions, transmuting the Evil into Good and Good into Evil, left at last nothing remaining but the mere action of subjectivity itself, the Abstractum of Spirit – Thought. Thought contemplates everything under the form of Universality, and is consequently the impulsion towards and production of the Universal.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel