German Idealism Quotes

“The one who merely flees is not yet free. In fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline & Critical Writings

“It is said that the spirits of the night are alarmed when they catch sight of the executioner’s sword: how then must they be alarmed when they are confronted by Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason! This book is the sword with which deism was put to death in Germany. Frankly, in comparison with us Germans, you French are tame and moderate. You have at most been able to kill a king . . . Immanuel Kant has stormed . . . heaven, he has put the whole crew to the sword, the Supreme Lord of the world swims unproven in his own blood.”
― Heinrich Heine

“[...]but in Germany, where the loyalty of the army and the bureaucracy was the basis of a new feudalism, government posts were reserved, except for subordinate offices, for the nobility and the junkers. The common people were oppressed by the officials of the Crown, high and low, as much and even more than by the manorial stewards in former days. The German peasants had never known anything but serfdom, but now the middle classes, as well, lost everything they had gained in the course of the fourteenth and 95 fifteenth centuries. First of all, they were impoverished and deprived of their privileges, then they lost their self-confidence and selfrespect. Finally, out of their misery, they developed those ideals of submissiveness and unquestioning loyalty which made it possible for any cringing philistine to think of himself as the servant of a ‘higher Idea’.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism

“Not only powers of intentional action, the power of intentional action is self-predicated. She who acts intentionally knows herself to have this power. The self-predication I am an intentional agent underlies and is contained in any dynamic self-predication I am doing A. Indeed, this self- predication is none other than the consciousness expressed by the word I in I am doing A. Once one recognizes this, it becomes much easier to read German Idealism.”
― Sebastian Rodl

“Mit einem Worte: durch die Wissenschaftslehre kommt der Geist des Menschen zu sich selbst, und ruht von nun an auf sich selbst, ohne fremde Hülfe, und wird seiner selbst durchaus mächtig, wie der Tänzer seiner Füße, oder der Fechter seiner Hände.”
― Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Sonnenklarer Bericht an das grössere Publicum über das eigentliche Wesen der neuesten Philosophie: Ein Versuch, die Leser zum Verstehen zu zwingen

“In order to grasp transcendental intuition in its purity, philosophical
reflection must further abstract from this subjective [aspect] so that transcendental intuition, as the foundation of philosophy, may be neither
subjective nor objective for it, neither self-consciousness as opposed to
matter, nor matter as opposed to self-consciousness, but pure transcendental intuition, absolute identity, that is neither subjective nor objective.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy

“In order to grasp transcendental intuition in its purity, philosophical reflection must further abstract from this subjective [aspect] so that transcendental intuition, as the foundation of philosophy, may be neither subjective nor objective for it, neither self-consciousness as opposed to matter, nor matter as opposed to self-consciousness, but pure transcendental intuition, absolute identity, that is neither subjective nor objective.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy

“Who the deepest has thought loves what is most alive.”
― Friederich Hölderlin