230 Quotes by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change. The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world.

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.

Religion is a begetting of the divine spirit, not an invention of human beings but an effect of the divine at work, of the divine productive process within humanity

The one who merely flees is not yet free. In fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees.

Man is an animal, but even in his animalfunctions, he is not confined to the implicit, as the animal is; hebecomes conscious of them, recognizes them, and lifts them, as,for instance, the process of digestion, into self-conscious science.In this way man breaks the barrier of his implicit and immediatecharacter, so that precisely because he knows that he is an animal,he ceases to be an animal and attains knowledge of himself asspirit.

To judge a thing that has substance and solid worth is quite easy, to comprehend it is much harder, and to blend judgement and comprehension in a definitive description is the hardest thing of all.

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

World history is a court of judgment

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.