Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes

The inclination to act as the laws command, a virtue, is a synthesis in which the law ... loses its universality and the subject its particularity; both lose their opposition, while in the Kantian conception of virtue this opposition remains, and the universal becomes the master and the particular the mastered.

What Jesus reveals is not that laws disappear but that they must be kept through righteousness of a new kind, ... which is more complete because it supplements the deficiency in the laws. ... This expanded content we may call an inclination so to act as the laws may command, i.e., a unification of inclination with the law whereby the latter loses its form as law. This correspondence with inclination is the πληρωμα [fulfillment] of the law.

Between the Shaman of the Tungus, the European prelate who rules church and state, the Voguls, and the Puritans, on the one hand, and the man who listens to his own command of duty, on the other, the difference is not that the former make themselves slaves, while the latter is free, but that the former have their lord outside themselves, while the latter carries his lord in himself, yet at the same time is his own slave.

The fate of the Jewish people is the fate of Macbeth who stepped out of nature itself, clung to alien beings, and so in their service had to trample and slay everything holy in human nature.

Das Schicksal des jüdischen Volkes ist das Schicksal Makbeths, der aus der Natur selbst trat, sich an fremde Wesen hing, und so in ihrem Dienste alles Heilige der menschlichen Natur zertreten und ermorden, von seinen Göttern (denn es waren Objekte, er war Knecht) endlich verlassen, und an seinem Glauben selbst zerschmettert werden mußte.

Hegel showed a far more modem approach when, during the same period, he compared the discovery of Sanskrit to that of a new continent because, in his view, it established "historic ties between the German and Indian peoples with all the certainty that can be required in dealing with such a subject" .&1 It was for this reason that he promoted the grand conception of the Indians as colonizers of Europe to the rank of irrefutable fact, in contrast to the fabulations (Erdichtungen) with which history is familiar: In the cohesion between the languages of peoples so widely separated from each other ... we are faced with an outcome which shows us that the dispersion of these peoples, starting from Asia, and their distinct evolution beginning with the same common ancestry, is an irrefutable fact (unwidersprechliches Faktum). This has nothing to do with hypothetical combinations of circumstances, great or small, which have enriched history with so many fabulations presented as facts, and which will continue to do so, since fresh combinations of the same circumstances, or of these with others, will always be possible.

Without being known too well, it [India] has existed for millennia in the imagination of the Europeans as a wonderland. Its fame, which it has always had with regard to its treasures, both its natural ones, and in particular, its wisdom, has lured men there.

India as a land of Desire formed an essential element in general history. From the most ancient times downwards, all nations have directed their wishes and longings to gaining access to the treasures of this land of marvels, the most costly which the earth presents, treasures of nature - pearls, diamonds, perfumes, rose essences, lions, elephants, etc. - as also treasures of wisdom. The way by which these treasures have passed to the West has at all times been a matter of world historical importance bound up with the fate of nations.

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..."

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

India has always been an object of yearning, a realm of wonder, a world of magic... India is the land of dreams. India had always dreamt - more of the Bliss that is man's final goal. And this has helped India to be more creative in history than any other nation. Hence the effervescence of myths and legends, religious and philosophies, music, and dances and the different styles of architecture." ...

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.

Philosophie ... hat zwar ihre Gegenstände zunächst mit der Religion gemeinschaftlich. Beide haben die Wahrheit zu ihrem Gegenstande, und zwar im höchsten Sinne - in dem, daß Gott die Wahrheit und er allein die Wahrheit ist.

There are Plebes in all classes.

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