Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes

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. The impulse of curiosity, the pressure for knowledge, from the lowest level up to the highest rung of philosophical insight arises only from the struggle to cancel this situation of unfreedom and to make the world one's own in one's ideas and thought.

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.

People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger in abstraction, and their light dies away.

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

An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

World history is a court of judgment

The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary.

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.

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