Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature.
The Christian imagination bas produced nothing but an insipid legend.
I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.
Art is the sensuous presentation of ideas.
To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual.
Every consciousness pursues the death of the other.
Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.
History teaches us that man learns nothing from history.
Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.
Only by resolving can a human being step into actuality, however bitter this may be to him. Inertia lacks the will to abandon the inward brooding which allows it to retain everything as as a possibility. But possibility is not yet actuality.
To the philosopher, infinity, knowledge, movement, empirical laws, etc., are things just as familiar {as family relations}. And as her dead brother and uncle are present to the peasant woman, thus Plato, Spinoza, etc. are present to the philosopher. The one has as much reality as the other, but the latter are immortal.
Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.
It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value.
Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.
It is specially characteristic of the German that the more servile he on the one hand is, the more uncontrolled is he on the other; restraint and want of restraint—originality, is the angel of darkness that buffets us.
The one who merely flees is not yet free. In fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees.
We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without enthusiasm.
By Nature man is not what he ought to be; only through a transforming process does he arrive at truth.
World history is a court of judgment.
Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself?
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.
When we look at the world rationally, the world looks rationally back.
History in general is therefore the development of Spirit in Time, as Nature is the development of the Idea is Space.
But if they realize that their true freedom consists in the acceptance of principles, of laws which are the own, a synthesis of universal and particular interests becomes possible.
The very fact that something is determined as a limitation implies that the limitation is already transcended.
The Few assume to be the deputies, but they are often only the despoilers of the Many.
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.
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.
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.
Each consciousness seeks the death of the other.
The important question of how poverty can be remedied is one which agitates and torments modern societies especially.
History is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history.
The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the coming of the dusk.
It is not a very pleasing spectacle to observe uncultivated ignorance and crudity of mind, with neither form nor taste, without the capacity to concentrate its thoughts on an abstract proposition, still less on a connected statement of such propositions, confidently proclaiming itself to be intellectual freedom and.
Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.
Commending myself to your kind memories, I wish you pleasant holidays.
The nature of finite things as such is to have the seed of passing away as their essential being: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.
Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.
Too fair to worship, too divine to love.
All that is real is reasonable, and all that is reasonable is real.
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 have the courage to be mistaken.
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.
War is progress, peace is stagnation.
Education is the art of making man ethical.
Wickedness also resides in the gaze that perceives itself as innocent and surrounded by wickedness.
The valor that struggles is better than the weakness that endures.
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.
Thinking is, indeed, essentially the negation of that which is before us.
