Education in its early stages always begins with fault-finding, but when it is complete, it sees the positive element in everything.

A man who has work that suits him and a wife, whom he loves, has squared his accounts with life.

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

To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality.

Beauty is merely the Spiritual making itself known sensuously.

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

God is the absolute truth.

The courage of the truth is the first condition of philosophic study.

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

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

When Philosophy with its abstractions paints grey in grey, the freshness and life of youth has gone, the reconciliation is not a reconciliation in the actual, but in the ideal world.

The science of religion is one science within philosophy; indeed it is the final one. In that respect it presupposes the other philosophical disciplines and is therefore a result.

In history, we are concerned with what has been and what is; in philosophy, however, we are concerned not with what belongs exclusively to the past or to the future, but with that which is, both now and eternally — in short, with reason.

Philosophy is its own time comprehended in thoughts.

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.

Action has a multitude of consequences. Thus the will has the right to repudiate the imputation of all consequences except the first, since it alone was purposed.

Matter is nothing except the resistance it offers me, yet matter is never without an essential form of its own.

Reason is negative and dialectical, because it resolves the determinations of the understanding into nothing.

The spoken word unites the objectivity of the corporeal sign with the subjectivity of gesture, the articulation of the latter with the self-awareness of the former.

To impose on others is hypocrisy; while to impose on oneself is a stage beyond hypocrisy.

In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design. … This may be called the cunning of reason.

Reason is just as cunning as she is powerful. Her cunning consists principally in her mediating activity, which, by causing objects to act and re-act on each other in accordance with their own nature, in this way, without any direct interference in the process, carries out reason’s intentions.

To go straight to the deepest depth, I went for Hegel; what unclear thoughtless flow of words I was to find there! My unlucky star led me from Hegel to Schopenhauer … Even in Kant there were many things that I could grasp so little that given his general acuity of mind I almost suspected that he was pulling the reader’s leg or was even an imposter.

The Christian imagination bas produced nothing but an insipid legend.

The spirit is never at rest, but always engaged in progressive motion, giving itself new form.

The sublime in art is the attempt to express the infinite without finding in the realm of phenomena any object which proves itself fitting for this representation.

Dialectic is here understood in the grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative.

There is nothing which is not an intermediate state between being and nothing.

Personality is that which struggles to lift itself above the restriction of being only subjective and to give itself reality.

The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself.

To recognize this unity of form and matter in all things, is what reason is striving to attain to. But in order to penetrate to this unity, in order to investigate all the secrets of Nature, we must search into the opposed and contradictory extremes of things, the maximum and the minimum.

The Philosophy of Nature takes up the material, prepared for it by physics out of experience, at the point to which physics has brought it, and again transforms it, without basing it ultimately on the authority of experience. Physics therefore must work into the hands of philosophy, so that the latter may translate into a true comprehension (Begriff) the abstract universal transmitted to it, showing how it issues from that comprehension as an intrinsically necessary whole.

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.

The Few assume to be the deputies, but they are often only the despoilers of the Many.

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

The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and the Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third, Monarchy.

Poverty in itself does not make men into a rabble; a rabble is created only when there is joined to poverty a disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the rich, against society, against the government.

Reason is the substance of the universe. The design of the world is absolutely rational.

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.

World history is a court of judgment.

We do not need to be shoemakers to know if our shoes fit, and just as little have we any need to be professionals to acquire knowledge of matters of universal interest.

I’m not ugly, but my beauty is a total creation.

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.

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

Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help.

As high as mind stands above nature, so high does the state stand above physical life. Man must therefore venerate the state as a secular deity.

Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.

Too fair to worship, too divine to love.

Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as it is to fancy that an individual can overleap his own age, jump over Rhodes.

The proofs of the existence of God are to such an extent fallen into discredit that they pass for something antiquated, belonging to days gone by.

If you want to love you must serve, if you want freedom you must die.

Destiny is consciousness of oneself, but consciousness of oneself as an enemy.

The true courage of civilized nations is readiness for sacrifice in the service of the state, so that the individual counts as only one amongst many. The important thing here is not personal mettle but aligning oneself with the universal.

The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony – periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.

Africa has no history and did not contribute to anything that mankind enjoyed.

I have the courage to be mistaken.

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.

It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; . . . the individual who has not staked his or her life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he or she has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.

Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me.

Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself.

Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.

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

There is nothing, nothing in heaven, or in nature or in mind or anywhere else which does not equally contain both immediacy and mediation.

Our epoch is a birth-time, and a period of transition. The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things hitherto prevailing, and with the old ways of thinking, and is in the mind to let them all sink into the depths of the past and to set about its own transformation.

The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. The ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes these stages moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and constitutes thereby the life of the whole.

Once the children have come of age, they become recognised as persons.

Be a person and respect others as persons.

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

The courage of truth is the first qualification for philosophic studies.

Nothing is easier than to judge what has substance and quality; to comprehend it is harder; and what is hardest is to combine both functions and produce an account of it.

What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.

To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual.

Everything that exists is rational; everything rational exists.

The true dialectic is between the human mind and the eternal truth.

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

Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature.

The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in everything.

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 – perhaps in a contest between North and South America. It is a land of desire for all those who are wary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe.

Man is an end in himself only by virtue of the divine in him – that which we designated at the outset as Reason, or, insofar as it has activity and power of self-determination, as Freedom.

Freedom is the truth of necessity.

The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom.

The History of the World is nothing but the development of the Idea of Freedom.

Political genius consists in identifying oneself with a principle.

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 lie idle in abstraction, till their light gradually dies away.

Education is the art of making man ethical.

The valor that struggles is better than the weakness that endures.

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

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

In the case of various kinds of knowledge, we find that what in former days occupied the energies of men of mature mental ability sinks to the level of information, exercises, and even pastimes for children; and in this educational progress we can see the history of the world’s culture delineated in faint outline.

The true is the whole.

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

Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.

War is progress, peace is stagnation.

History teaches us that man learns nothing from history.

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.

What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.

Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary.

Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.

To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them.

Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.

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

We learn from history that we do not learn from history.

Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion.