Quotes from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is not a hero, but because the valet is a valet.

The more certain our knowledge the less we know.

Every idea, extended into infinity, becomes its own opposite.

Science and knowledge, especially that of philosophy, came from the Arabs into the West.

Life has value only when it has something valuable as its object.

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.

Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.

Animals are in possession of themselves; their soul is in possession of their body. But they have no right to their life, because they do not will it.

Children are potentially free and their life directly embodies nothing save potential freedom. Consequently they are not things and cannot be the property either of their parents or others.

The nature of finite things is to have the seed of their passing-away as their essential being: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.

To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.

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

Before the end of Time will be the end of History. Before the end of History will be the end of Art.

Beauty and art, no doubt, pervade all business of life like a kindly genius, and form the bright adornment of all our surroundings, both mental and material, soothing the sadness of our condition and the embarrassments of real life, killing time in entertaining fashion, and where there's nothing to be achieved, occupying the place of what is vicious, better, at any rate, than vice.

The anti-human, the merely animal, consists in staying within the sphere of feeling, and being able to communicate only at that level. (1807, § 69).

What is reasonable is real; that which is real is reasonable.

No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is not a hero, but because the valet is a valet.

Reading the morning newspaper is the realist's morning prayer. One orients one's attitude toward the world either by God or by what the world is. The former gives as much security as the latter, in that one knows how one stands.

It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen.

We must have a new mythology, but it must place itself at the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason. Mythology must become philosophical, so that the people may become rational, and philosophy must become mythological, so that philosophers may become sensible. If we do not give ideas a form that is aesthetic, i.e., mythological, they will hold no interest for people.

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.

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

The one who merely flees is not yet free. In fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees.

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.