50 Hegel Quotes

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Short Hegel Quotes

  • As Hegel well knew, the ascent of reason has never followed a straight line. — Paul A. Baran
  • Fichte is a necessary step to both Hegel and Marx. — Allen W. Wood
  • Hegel's theory of recognition is basically derived from Fichte, who is its real author. — Allen W. Wood
  • I'm so smart, I read and understand Hegel — Oscar Wilde
  • Think of me as an impetuous Hegel, drunk with power, and also, regular drunk. — Eugene Mirman

People Writing About Hegel

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Read quotes by Allen W. Wood

Allen W. Wood
quotes on life, war and leadership

130 36
Read quotes by Paul A. Baran

Paul A. Baran
quotes on love

20 22
Read quotes by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde
quotes on love, love and marriage and life

1908 25561
Read quotes by Eugene Mirman

Eugene Mirman
quotes on life, love and marriage

76 138

More Hegel Quotes

At the present moment, the security of coherent philosophy, which existed from Parmenides to Hegel, is lost. — Karl Jaspers

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. — Karl Marx

Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night. — Terry Eagleton

Berkeley , Hume, Kant , Fichte , Hegel , James , Bergson all are united in one earnest attempt, the attempt to reinstate man with his high spiritual claims in a place of importance in the cosmic scheme. — David Hume

To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs -- but a tribute nevertheless. — George Steiner

When Hegel later became a man of influence' he insisted that the Jews should be granted equal rights because civic rights belong to man because he is a man and not on account of his ethnic origins or his religion. — Walter Kaufmann

Georg Hegel viewed the "great men" as instruments of something far greater. Hegel believes that an individual can indeed embody the zeitgeist for a moment, but also that the individual isn't always clear they are doing so. — Emmanuel Macron

Hegel's philosophy is so odd that one would not have expected him to be able to get sane men to accept it, but he did. He set it out with so much obscurity that people thought it must be profound. It can quite easily be expounded lucidly in words of one syllable, but then its absurdity becomes obvious. — Bertrand Russell

Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity. — Friedrich Engels

There is more to be learnt from every page of David Hume than from the collected philosophical works of Hegel, Herbart, and Schleiermacher are taken together. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Hegel said that `truth` is subjective, thus rejecting the existence of any `truth` above or beyond human reason. All knowledge is human knowledge. — Jostein Gaarder

For my own part, I abandon the ethics of duty to the Hegelian critique with no regrets; it would appear to me, indeed, to have been correctly characterized by Hegel as an abstract thought, as a thought of understanding. — Paul Ricoeur

It was also Hegel who established the view that the different philosophic systems that we find in history are to be comprehended in terms of development and that they are generally one-sided because they owe their origins to a reaction against what has gone before. — Walter Kaufmann

As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend. — Walter Benjamin

Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don't see any way of getting beyond those prophecies. — Harold Bloom

Hegel held that the two sexes were of necessity different, the one being active and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one. — Simone de Beauvoir

Thinking is the subtlest form of self-polemics, the art of a certain finesse in psychological self-vivisection and self-crucifixion (Hegel of course called the path of self-disillusion the via dolorosa or "highway of despair," in Baillie's fine and florid rendering, like Jesus' route to Golgotha). — Kenny Smith

As Karl Marx once noted: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial was a tragedy. The creationists and intelligent design theorists are a farce. — Michael Shermer

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. — Karl Marx

Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers. — Alain de Botton

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history. — George Bernard Shaw

The word change, so dear to our Europe, has been given a new meaning: it no longer means a new stage of coherent development (as it was understood by Vico, Hegel or Marx), but a shift from one side to another, from front to back, from the back to the left, from the left to the front (as understood by designers dreaming up the fashion for the next season). — Milan Kundera

Well, I don't know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I'm no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much. — Roger Penrose

An abiding and central concern of philosophy and religion alike is the fear that the world is alien to human beings, that nature is, in Hegel's words, 'out and out other' to 'spirit'. It's easy enough to see how 'constructivist' or 'humanist' conceptions are efforts to dispel this fear. — David E. Cooper

H.P.Lovecraft could've been trying to do a Marx to Hegel, that kind of thing, in other words, turn the thing upside down and crawl around inside it. But, look, the guy was eating poorly, he had like a quart of ice cream a day. He was suffering constantly near the end. He wasn't concerned with his body at all, not the way we're concerned with our bodies nowadays. — Paul Laffoley

Most "process" philosophy is historicist (e.g., Hegel) and not concerned with "deep time." Maybe Whitehead is an exception. He may be a really important philosopher for all I know. I've never been able to read him. — Dale Jamieson

That Hegel's theory is derivative from Fichte's does not prevent it from being strikingly original and of independent value. — Allen W. Wood

Surely the world will be a better place, at least marginally, if people have a better understanding of Kant and Hegel, if Marx's thought its studied and appreciated, if people gain a better understanding of Fichte, whose philosophy is far more important than people realize. — Allen W. Wood

The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and so they struggled by all conceptual means to avoid it. — Frederick C. Beiser

Hegel remains of great importance to understand ourselves, but essentially because we have all grown out of a reaction against Hegel. — Frederick C. Beiser

Since substance is infinite, the universe as a whole, i.e., god, Hegel is telling us that philosophy is knowledge of the infinite, of the universe as a whole, i.e, god. You cannot get more metaphysical than that. I think that Hegel scholars have to admit this basic fact rather than burying their heads in the sand and trying to pretend that Hegel is concerned with conceptual analysis, category theory, normativity or some such contemporary fad. — Frederick C. Beiser

That Hegel is a metaphysician, and that he thinks metaphysics is fundamental to philosophy, is plain enough from his definition of philosophy. — Frederick C. Beiser

In Marxism there are some very unhelpful ideas about the need to push for a revolution that will overturn all of society. Marx gets that from Hegel, and it leads to some very bad politics, such as the hope that things must get worse because that will then turn into the antithesis and get better from there. A kind of wishful thinking then grows out of not seeing a realistic path forward. — Cynthia Kauffman

Protestantism, of course, is much more explicitly divided into different traditions - the Pentecostals, the Anglicans. But there is the main tradition of Protestantism that comes out of the Reformation and that produced people like Kant and Hegel and so on, who are not normally thought of as being people writing in a theological tradition, although Hegel, of course, wrote theology his whole life. — Marilynne Robinson

Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I knew people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view. — John Brunner

Contemporary philosophy illustrates Hegel's dictum that philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought, for in our age philosophy yields to the objectifying technical impulse and loses its ancient task of pursuing the Socratic ideal of the wisdom of the examined life. — Donald Phillip Verene

Unlike Hegel's progress model of history, which moves by stages, each containing its own logic of growth and decline, the economic model develops as the simple function of one money-variable over time, with a long-term trend which increases monotonically. — John Carroll

Life is more than thought: what a man feels, and what his senses awaken in him, are more indispensable to his life's fullness than subsequent reflection on their significance. Both Stirner and Nietzsche have elaborated Faust's opening speech in which he bemoans his wasted years in academia: this speech is Goethe's own impeachment of Kant and Hegel . Philosophy proceeds always under the risk of making a fetish of thinking. — John Carroll

To a society that inarticulately and thoughtlessly takes itself to be divine, Hegel says, Yes, we are indeed divine, and philosophy can show how this is both possible and necessary. — Merold Westphal

The Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion. — Simone de Beauvoir

The problems of human subjectivity replicate themselves at many different scales, like the overtones and undertones in a stringed instrument striking ghost-intervals up and down into infinity. This is not Hegel's ingenuity, it is his responsiveness to the organic structure in us that echoes itself throughout the whole architecture. — Kenny Smith

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