Wisdom of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27th, 1770 – November 14th, 1831) was a German philosopher and an important voice of German idealism and 19th-century philosophy. He wrote about the philosophical side of many contemporary topics, including metaphysics, art, history, politics, and religion.

He is famous for The Phenomenology of Spirit, The Science of Logic, and University of Berlin lectures on subjects from his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences.

Below we list some words of wisdom from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

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

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

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

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

"Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion."

"What history teaches us is that neither nations nor governments ever learn anything from it."

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

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

"I have the courage to be mistaken."

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

"War is progress, peace is stagnation."

"The more certain our knowledge the less we know."

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

"Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me"

"An individual piece only has meaning when it is seen as part of the whole."

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

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

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

"Public opinion contains all kinds of falsity and truth, but it takes a great man to find the truth in it. The great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age what its will is, and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and the essence of his age, he actualizes his age. The man who lacks sense enough to despise public opinion expressed in gossip will never do anything great."

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

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

"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."

"Education to independence demands that young people should be accustomed early to consult their own sense of propriety and their own reason. To regard study as mere receptivity and memory work is to have a most incomplete view of what instruction means."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality."

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

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

"Whatever is reasonable is true, and whatever is true is reasonable"

"God is the absolute truth..."

"Everything that from eternity has happened in heaven and earth, the life of God and all the deeds of time simply are the struggles for Spirit to know Itself, to find Itself, be for Itself, and finally unite itself to Itself; it is alienated and divided, but only so as to be able thus to find itself and return to Itself...As existing in an individual form, this liberation is called 'I'; as developed to its totality, it is free Spirit; as feeling, it is Love; and as enjoyment, it is Blessedness."

"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."

Copyright © Stephen Petullo, Scott Petullo