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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes

“Wenn aber der Widerstreit des Glaubens und der Vernunft verschwunden und in eine Aussöhnung übergegangen ist, so würde es wesentlich von der Natur dieser Aussöhnung selbst abhängen, inwiefern zu ihr Glück zu wünschen wäre. Denn es gibt auch einen Frieden der Gleichgültigkeit gegen die Tiefen des Geistes, einen Frieden des Leichtsinns, der Kahlheit; in einem solchen Frieden kann das Widerwärtige beseitigt scheinen, indem es nur auf die Seite gestellt ist. (Vorrede zu Hinrichs' Religionsphilosophie, 1822)”

“No matter how deeply it [a faith based on mere authority] entrenches itself behind authority, no matter how artfully it seeks to ward off all counter-hypotheses and alternative possibilities by assembling a system that covers every conceivable circumstance . . . , reason will still venture to subject it to critical scrutiny. And it will do so spontaneously [aus sich selbst], generating from within itself principles of possibility and plausibility irrespective of any such artificial historical structure predisposed to neglect reason and to claim primacy on historical grounds over the persuasiveness of rational truths.”

“Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality. Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself.”

“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.”

“Since philosophy is the exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the apprehension of the present and the actual, not the erection of a beyond, supposed to exist, God knows where, or rather which exists, and we can perfectly well say where, namely in the error of a one-sided, empty, ratiocination.”

“For us, mind has nature for its premise, being nature's truth and for that reason its absolute prius. In this truth nature has vanished, and mind has resulted as the idea arrived at being-for-itself, the object of which, as well as the subject, is the concept. This identity is absolute negativity, for whereas in nature the concept has its perfect external objectivity, this its alienation has been superseded, and in this alienation the concept has become identical with itself. But it is this identity therefore, only in being a return out of nature.”