Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes (1770-1831)

“What we call principle, aim, destiny, or the nature and idea of Spirit, is something merely general and abstract. Principle — Plan of Existence — Law — is a hidden, undeveloped essence, which as such — however true in itself — is not completely real.”

“This conceit which understands how to belittle every truth, in order to turn back into itself and gloat over its own understanding, which knows how to dissolve every thought and always find the same barren Ego instead of any content—this is a satisfaction which we must leave to itself.”

“What experience and history teach is this, ... that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.”

“What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.”

“What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.”

“The objects of philosophy, it is true, are upon the whole the same as those of religion. In both the object is Truth, in that supreme sense in which God and God only is the Truth.”

“The objects of philosophy, it is true, are upon the whole the same as those of religion. In both the object is Truth, in that supreme sense in which God and God only is the Truth.”

“For a man without the pride of being the center of things the end of his collective whole is supreme, and being, like all other individuals, so small a part of that, he despises himself.”

“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..."”

“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.”

“In the history of philosophy we meet with Substance as the principle of Spinoza's system. On the import and value of this much-praised and no-less decried philosophy there has been great misunderstanding and a deal of talking since the days of Spinoza. The atheism, and as a further charge, the pantheism of the system has formed the commonest ground of accusation. These cries arise because of Spinoza's conception of God as substance, and substance only. What we are to think of this charge follows, in the first instance, from the place which substance takes in the system of the logical idea. Though an essential stage in the evolution of the idea, substance is not the same with absolute idea, but the idea under the still limited form of necessity.”

“[With Heraclitus] we see land; there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic.”

“Virgil seems to have copied Greek models completely, imitating them slavishly and lifelessly, and so they appear as plagiarisms more or less devoid of spirit.”

“He penetrated into the whole universe of things, and subjected its scattered wealth to intelligence; and to him the greater number of the philosophical sciences owe their origin and distinction.”

“This great empire Charlemagne formed into a systematically organized State, and gave the Frank dominion settled institutions adapted to impart to it strength and consistency. This must however not be understood, as if he first introduced the Constitution of his empire in its whole extent, but as implying that institutions partly already in existence, were developed under his guidance, and attained a more decided and unobstructed efficiency. The King stood at the head of the officers of the empire, and the principle of hereditary monarchy was already recognized.”

“Plato was aware that divination is something inferior that pertains to the non-rational soul. The main point is that they [clairvoyants] name their illnesses, especially chronic nervous disorders that are not yet fully developed. Also, rheumatism, toothaches, yield to magnetism. Remarkably, it seems to have an effect on the maladies of menstruation. The somnambulists especially know how to specify these disorders and it is easy to admit that they discover deficiencies. They describe these conditions, but in an entirely ordinary manner, not in the manner of one who understands anatomy. Then they indicate the remedy for their disease.”

“In one of his earlier writings, the System of Transcendental Idealism; which we shall consider first of all, Schelling represented transcendental philosophy and natural philosophy as the two sides of scientific knowledge. Respecting the nature of the two, he expressly declared himself in this work, where he once more adopts a Fichtian starting-point: “All knowledge rests on the harmony of an objective with a subjective” In the common sense of the words this would be allowed; absolute unity, where the Notion and the reality are undistinguished in the perfected Idea, is the Absolute alone, or God; all else contains an element of discord between the objective and subjective. “We may give the name of nature to the entire objective content of our knowledge the entire subjective content, on the other hand, is called the ego or intelligence.” They are in themselves identical and presupposed as identical. The relation of nature to intelligence is given by Schelling thus: “Now if all knowledge has two poles which mutually presuppose and demand one another, there must be two fundamental sciences, and it must be impossible to start from the one pole without being driven to the other”. Thus nature is impelled to spirit, and spirit to nature; either may be given the first place, and both must come to pass. “If the objective is made the chief” we have the natural sciences as result, and; “the necessary tendency” the end, of all natural science thus is to pass from nature to intelligence. This is the meaning of the effort to connect natural phenomena with theory. The highest perfection of natural science would be the perfect spiritualization of all natural laws into laws of intuitive perception and thought."”

“Hegel ... destroyed the illusion of the subject's being-in-itself and showed that the subject is itself an aspect of social objectivity. ... However, ... we must ask this question: is this objectivity which we have shown to be a necessary condition and which subsumes abstract subjectivity in fact the higher factor? Does it not rather remain precisely what Hegel reproached it with being in his youth, namely pure externality, the coercive collective? Does not the retreat to this supposedly higher authority signify the regression of the subject, which had earlier won its freedom only with the greatest efforts, with infinite pains?”

“Hegel's complex thought was brought into focus by power "concentrated in a point," which made new beginnings possible. When political reaction followed Napoleonic innovations and Prussian reform , Hegel sought to convert philosophy into a political weapon. He succeeded in politicizing philosophy; his lectures satisfied the striving toward power and "relevance" that was inherent in the University of Berlin-and in much of modern intellectual life. Hegel expressed, first of all, the supreme self-confidence of the thinking man in the value of his thought. Everything became relative to historical context because his own capacity for seeing the whole picture was assumed to be absolute. Accepting the romantic belief that truth was revealed in the peculiarities of history rather than in a static natural order, Hegel nevertheless simultaneously pressed the Enlightenment idea that all was rational. His method applied reason to precisely those phenomena that most interested the romantic mind : art, philosophy, and religion. He had begun as a student of theology, in search of a theodicy, a justification of the ways of God to man ; he ended up instead creating a new God : the "World Spirit." Just as Hegel saw his chair of philosophy giving overall coherence to the intellectual variety of the new university, so the World Spirit provided a unifying rationale to the historical process. Just as Berlin University was the dynamo for regenerating German society, so Hegel's philosophy was its source of dynamism.”

“Clearness and vividness in writing often turn on mere specificity. To say that Major André was hanged is clear and definite; to say that he as killed is less definite, because you do not know in what way he was killed; to say that he died is still more indefinite because you do not even know whether his death was due to violence or to natural causes. If we were to use this statement as a varying symbol by which to rank writers for clearness, we might, I think, get something like the following: Swift, Macauley, and Shaw would say that André was hanged. Bradley would say that he was killed. Bosanquet would say that he died. Kant would say that his mortal existence achieved its termination. Hegel would say that a finite determination of infinity had been further determined by its own negation.”

“Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, James, Bergson all are united in one earnest attempt, the attempt to reinstate man with his high spiritual claims in a place of importance in the cosmic scheme.”

“Hegel clothed his absolute in the mystical shape of a world spirit, and made the cardinal error of bringing the course of history to an end in the present instead of projecting it into the future. He recognized a process of continuous evolution in the past, and incongruously denied it in the future.”

“There is an apocryphal story that, when Hegel was lecturing on the philosophy of history, a history student in the class interrupted to say, 'But Herr Professor, the facts are different,' to which Hegel, unruffled, replied, 'So much the worse for the facts.'”

“Following Kant, the most significant German philosopher was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose emphasis on mind and idealism was, if anything, even greater than Kant's, as his practical influence also may have been during the nineteenth century. Hayek abhorred Hegel, considering his work virtually without value. At the same time, Hegel's emphasis on mind and idealism indicate the philosophical heritage from which Hayek sprang.”

“Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity.”

“For better or worse, much of Hegel's historicism has become part of our contemporary intellectual baggage.  The notion that mankind has progresses through a series of primitive stages of consciousness on his path to the present, and that these stages corresponded to concrete forms of social organization, such as tribal, slave owning, theocratic, and finally democratic egalitarian societies, has become inseparable form the modern understanding of man.  Hegel was the first philosopher to speak the language of modern social science, insofar as man for him was the product of his concrete historical and social environment and not, as earlier natural right theorists would have it, a collection of more or less fixed "natural" attributes. The mastery and transformation of man's natural environment through the application of science and technology was originally not a Marxist concept, but a Hegelian one. Unlike later historicists whose historical relativism degenerated into relativism tout court, however, Hegel believed that history culminated in an absolute moment -- a moment in which a final, rational form of society and state became victorious”

“Dr J. O. Wisdom once observed to me that he knew people who thought there was no philosophy after Hegel, and others who thought there was none before Wittgenstein; and he saw no reason for excluding the possibility that both were right.”