Education is the art of making man ethical.

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally Subject.

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

History, is a conscious, self-meditating process — Spirit emptied out into Time; but this externalization, this kenosis, is equally an externalization of itself; the negative is the negative of itself. This Becoming presents a slow-moving succession of Spirits, a gallery of images, each of which, endowed with all the riches of Spirit, moves thus slowly just because the Self has to penetrate and digest this entire wealth of its substance. As its fulfillment consists in perfectly knowing what it is, in knowing its substance, this knowing is that withdrawal into itself in which it abandons its outer existence and gives its existential shape over to recollection. Thus absorbed in itself, it is sunk in the night of its self-consciousness; but in that night its vanished outer existence is preserved, and this transformed existence — the former one, but now reborn of the Spirit's knowledge — is the new existence, a new world and a new shape of Spirit. In the immediacy of this new existence the Spirit has to start afresh to bring itself to maturity as if, for it, all that preceded were lost, and it had learned nothing from the experience of the earlier Spirits. But recollection, the linearizing, of that experience, has preserved it and is the inner-being, and in fact the higher form of the substance. So although to bring itself to maturity, it is nonetheless on a higher level that it starts. The realm of Spirits which is formed in this way in the outer world constitutes a succession in Time in which one Spirit relieved another of its charge and each took over the empire of the world from its predecessor.

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

If we are in a general way permitted to regard human activity in the realm of the beautiful as a liberation of the soul, as a release from constraint and restriction, in short to consider that art does actually alleviate the most overpowering and tragic catastrophes by means of the creations it offers to our contemplation and enjoyment, it is the art of music which conducts us to the final summit of that ascent to freedom.

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature.

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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.

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel