Top 140 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

102. “Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

103. “The Few assume to be the deputies, but they are often only the despoilers of the Many.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

104. “To judge a thing that has substance and solid worth is quite easy, to comprehend it is much harder, and to blend judgement and comprehension in a definitive description is the hardest thing of all.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

105. “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.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

106. “There are Plebes in all classes.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

107. “The system of logic is the realm of shadows, the world of simple essentialities, freed of all sensuous concretion. To study this science, to dwell and to labor in this realm of shadows, is the absolute culture and discipline of consciousness.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

108. “It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

109. “The man whom philosophy leaves cold, and the man whom real faith does not illuminate, may be assured that the fault lies in them, not in knowledge and faith. The former is still an alien to philosophy, the latter an alien to faith.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

110. “Wickedness also resides in the gaze that perceives itself as innocent and surrounded by wickedness.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

111. “If we go on to cast a look at the fate of world historical personalities... we shall find it to have been no happy one. They attained no calm enjoyment; their whole life was labor and trouble; their whole nature was nothing 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 Casear; transported to St. Helena, like Napoleon.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

112. “The Catholics had been in the position of oppressors, and the Protestants of the oppressed.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

113. “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.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

114. “It is because the method of physics does not satisfy the comprehension that we have to go on further.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

115. “It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

116. “Serious occupation is labor that has reference to some want.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

117. “No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is a valet.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

118. “Art is the sensuous presentation of ideas.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

119. “Uneducated people delight in argument and fault-finding, for it is easy to find fault, but difficult to recognize the good and its inner necessity.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

120. “History in general is therefore the development of Spirit in Time, as Nature is the development of the Idea is Space.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

121. “Science and knowledge, especially that of philosophy, came from the Arabs into the West.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

122. “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.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

123. “The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change. The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

124. “But if they realize that their true freedom consists in the acceptance of principles, of laws which are the own, a synthesis of universal and particular interests becomes possible.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

125. “The very fact that something is determined as a limitation implies that the limitation is already transcended.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

126. “It is not a very pleasing spectacle to observe uncultivated ignorance and crudity of mind, with neither form nor taste, without the capacity to concentrate its thoughts on an abstract proposition, still less on a connected statement of such propositions, confidently proclaiming itself to be intellectual freedom and.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

127. “In a true tragedy, both parties must be right.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

128. “Commending myself to your kind memories, I wish you pleasant holidays.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

129. “Wars are terrible, but necessary, for they save the state from social petrification and stagnation.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

130. “Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

131. “Only by resolving can a human being step into actuality, however bitter this may be to him. Inertia lacks the will to abandon the inward brooding which allows it to retain everything as as a possibility. But possibility is not yet actuality.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

132. “It is specially characteristic of the German that the more servile he on the one hand is, the more uncontrolled is he on the other; restraint and want of restraint – originality, is the angel of darkness that buffets us.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

133. “Devotion – a state of mind in which it refuses to occupy itself any longer with the limited and particular. By.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

134. “The most obvious symptoms of an epoch-making system are the misunderstandings and the awkward conduct of its adversaries.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

135. “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.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

136. “Education in its early stages always begins with fault-finding, but when it is complete, it sees the positive element in everything.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

137. “The middle class, to which the civil servants belong, has a political consciousness and is the most conspicuously educated class. For this reason, it is the mainstay of the state as far as integrity and intelligence are concerned. Consequently, the level of a state which has no middle class cannot be high.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

138. “With regard to the purpose, one should not immediately or should not merely think of the form in which it is in consciousness, as a determination on hand in the representation. Through the concept of inner purposiveness, Kant re-awakened the idea in general and that of life in particular. Aristotle’s determination of life already contains the inner purposiveness and thus stands infinitely far beyond the concept of modern teleology which has only the finite, the external purposiveness in view.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

139. “In Mohammedanism the limited principle of the Jews is expanded into universality and thereby overcome. Here, God is no longer, as with the Asiatics, contemplated as existent in immediately sensuous mode but is apprehended as the one infinite sublime Power beyond all the multiplicity of the world. Mohammedanism is, therefore, in the strictest sense of the world, the religion of sublimity.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

140. “Every kind of falsehood and truth is present in public opinion, but it is the prerogative of the great man to discover the truth within it. He who expresses the will of his age, tells it what its will is, and accomplishes this will, is the great man of the age.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

141. “We must hold to the conviction that it is the nature of truth to prevail when its time has come, and that it appears only when this time has come, and therefore never appears prematurely, nor finds a public not ripe to receive it; also we must accept that the individual needs that this should be so in order to verify what is as yet a matter for himself alone, and to experience the conviction, which in the first place belongs only to a particular individual, as something universally held.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel