Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes

Was vernünftig ist, das ist Wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig.

History is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history.

I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.

It is not the purpose of philosophy to edify

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.

If we are in a general way permitted to regard human activity in the realm of the beautiful as a liberation of the soul, as a release from constraint and restriction, in short to consider that art does actually alleviate the most overpowering and tragic catastrophes by means of the creations it offers to our contemplation and enjoyment, it is the art of music which conducts us to the final summit of that ascent to freedom.

We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.

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.

Nicht die Neugierde, nicht die Eitelkeit, nicht die Betrachtung der Nützlichkeit, nicht die Pflicht und Gewissenhaftigkeit, sondern ein unauslöschlicher, unglücklicher Durst, der sich auf keinen Vergleich einläßt, führt uns zur Wahrheit.

Without rhetorical exaggeration, a simply truthful combination of the miseries that have overwhelmed the noblest of nations and polities, and the finest exemplars of private virtue, forms a picture of most fearful aspect, and excites emotions of the profoundest and most hopeless sadness, counterbalanced by no consolatory result. We endure in beholding it a mental torture, allowing no defence or escape but the consideration that what has happened could not be otherwise ; that it is a fatality which no intervention could alter. And at last we draw back from the intolerable disgust with which these sorrowful reflections threaten us, into the more agreeable environment of our individual life the Present formed by our private aims and interests. In short we retreat into the selfishness that stands on the quiet shore, and thence enjoys in safety the distant spectacle of "wrecks confusedly hurled." But even regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimised the question involuntarily arises to what principle, to what final aim these.enormous sacrifices have been offered.

Si la simple expression de la douleur et de la joie soulage le coeur, les épanchements de la poésie lyrique [ont] une mission plus haute ; celle, non de délivrer l'esprit du sentiment, mais de l'affranchir dans le sentiment.

En effet, la domination aveugle de la passion consiste en ce que l'âme s'identifie tout entière avec elle, au point de ne plus pouvoir s'en détacher, de ne pouvoir se contempler et s'exprimer elle-même. Or la poésie délivre, à la vérité, l'âme de cette oppression en lui mettant sous les yeux sa propre image. Elle fait de chaque sentiment accidentel un objet purifié, dans lequel l'âme affranchie retourne libre à elle-même dans sa conscience délivrée et s'y retrouve chez elle.

Too fair to worship, too divine to love.

Das Wahre ist das Ganze.

Die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug.

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.