63 Quotes About 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.

Man's nature, he postulated, was to be a "free conscious producer," but so far he had not been able to express himself freely in productive activity. He had been driven to produce by need and greed, by a passion for accumulation which in the modern bourgeois age becomes accumulation of capital. His productive activity had always, therefore, been involuntary; it had been "labour.

Evolution is about reason optimizing itself, and it has to do so through its myriad, competing monadic nodes, which include all of us. It is the hardest rational task conceivable, the ultimate, cosmic, Rubik's Cube.

With respect to modern civilisation and society, it may indeed be said that nothing possesses a more revolutionary character than Tradition, which — in proper and Hegelian terms  — constitutes the ‘negation of a negation’: for the latter is what, through ‘progress’, has desecrated everything and subverted every normal order, leading us to the state we find ourselves in today.

Hegel used to say that the familiar, precisely because it is familiar, remains unknown. That’s why we don't know so much about stupidity.

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world...

This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e., to recognise it by means of another interpretation....They forget however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world.

The sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as "substance" and "essence of man," and what they have deified and attacked: a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as "self-consciousness" and the "Unique.

To say that in every falsehood there is a grain of truth is to treat the two like oil and water, which cannot be mixed and are only externally combined.