Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes

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.

When we look at the world rationally, the world looks rationally back.

One more word about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed...

When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.

By Nature man is not what he ought to be; only through a transforming process does he arrive at truth.

Lacking strength beauty hates the understanding for asking of her what it cannot do but the life of spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being.

But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.... Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.

Thinking is, indeed, essentially the negation of that which is before us.

We stand at the gates of an important epoch, a time of ferment, when spirit moves forward in a leap, transcends its previous shape and takes on a new one..... A new phase of the spirit is preparing itself. Philosophy especially has to welcome its appearance and acknowledge it, while others, who oppose it impotently, cling the past.

"When a father inquired about the best method of educating his son in ethical conduct, a Pythagorean replied: "Make him a citizen of a state with good laws

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

Every consciousness pursues the death of the other.

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

History teaches us that man learns nothing from history.

The vanity of the contents” of individual experience is scrutable as an inessential trapping drawn into a matter by vested interests “…since it is at the same time the vanity of the self that knows itself to be vain

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