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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes

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Famous Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes

“The two first parts of the doctrine of Mind embrace the finite mind. Mind is the infinite Idea, and finitude here means the disproportion between the concept and the reality – but with the qualification that it is a shadow cast by the mind’s own light – a show or illusion which the mind implicitly imposes as a barrier to itself, in order, by its removal, actually to realize and become conscious of freedom as its very being, i.e. to be fully manifested. The several steps of this activity, on each of which, with their semblance of being, it is the function of the finite mind to linger, and through which it has to pass, are steps in its liberation. In the full truth of that liberation is given the identification of the three stages – finding a world presupposed before us, generating a world as our own creation, and gaining freedom from it and in it. To the infinite form of this truth the show purifies itself till it becomes a consciousness of it.”

“I hold the view that the World Spirit has given the times the order to advance; such an order is obeyed; this being strides forward like an armored, firmly closed phalanx, irresistibly and as imperceptibly as the sun moves, through thick and thin; it is flanked by innumerable light troops for and against it; most of them have no idea of what is at stake, and only get knocked on over the head, as if by an invisible hand. All the hesitant fibbing and sophisticated shadow boxing in the world is of no help against it; it can only reach about as high as the shoelaces of this colossus and smear a bit of mud or shoe polish on them, but it cannot loosen them, much less remove the divine shoes with the elastic soles or the seven-league boots, if the colossus puts them on. The safest game (both inwardly and outwardly) is, I dare say, to keep one's eye on the advancing giant.”

“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.”

“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.”