Hegel Quotes

“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, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

“The only way to survive such shitty times, if you ask me, is to write and read big, fat books, you know? And I’m writing now another book on Hegelian dialectics, subjectivity, ontology, quantum physics and so on. That’s the only way to survive. Like Lenin. I will use his example. You know what Lenin did, in 1915, when World War I exploded? He went to Switzerland and started to read Hegel.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.”
― Hegel, G. W. H.

“G.W.F. Hegel. "He's perfect," Weishaupt wrote.... "Unlike Kant, who makes sense only in German, this man doesn't make sense in any language.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Leviathan

“[O]ne has to have endured a few decades before wanting, let alone needing, to embark on the project of recovering lost life. And I think it may be possible to review 'the chronicles of wasted time.' William Morris wrote in The Dream of John Ball that men fight for things and then lose the battle, only to win it again in a shape and form that they had not expected, and then be compelled again to defend it under another name. We are all of us very good at self-persuasion and I strive to be alert to its traps, but a version of what Hegel called 'the cunning of history' is a parallel commentary that I fight to keep alive in my mind.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“May Hegel's philosophy of absolute nonsense - three-fourths cash and one-fourth crazy fancies - continue to pass for unfathomable wisdom without anyone suggesting as an appropriate motto for his writings Shakespeare's words: "Such stuff as madmen tongue and brain not," or, as an emblematical vignette, the cuttle-fish with its ink-bag, creating a cloud of darkness around it to prevent people from seeing what it is, with the device: mea caligine tutus. - May each day bring us, as hitherto, new systems adapted for University purposes, entirely made up of words and phrases and in a learned jargon besides, which allows people to talk whole days without saying anything; and may these delights never be disturbed by the Arabian proverb: "I hear the clappering of the mill, but I see no flour." - For all this is in accordance with the age and must have its course.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays of Schopenhauer

“For Hegel, by contrast, liberal society is a reciprocal and equal agreement among citizens to mutually recognize each other”
― Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

“My criticism of Hegel procedure is that when in his discussion he arrives at a contradiction, he construes it as a crisis in the universe.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“If it were Hegel, I might suspect it means nothing. But Goethe means something, always.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Masks of the Illuminati

“Logic is also the theory of knowledge of Marxism, but for quite another reason, because the forms themselves of the activity of the ‘spirit’ – the categories and schemas of logic – are inferred from investigation of the history of humanity’s knowledge and practice, i.e. from the process in the course of which thinking man (or rather humanity) cognises and transforms the material world. From that standpoint logic also cannot be anything else than a theory explaining the universal schemas of the development of knowledge and of the material world by social man.”
― Evald Vasilyevich Ilyenkov, Dialectical Logic

“Seule la totalite personnifie la verite. Neanmoins, la totalite represente simplement la nature essentielle parvenant a son etat complet au travers du processus de son propre developpement.
Il doit etre dit que, fondamentalement, l'Absolu est un resultat, et c'est seulement a la fin qu'il represente ce qu'il est veritablement.”
― Hegel

“Le point final du processus dialectique represente l'esprit qui se reconnait comme l'ultime realite, et realise que tout ce qu'il a considere jusqu'alors comme etranger et hostile a lui-meme,
en verite, en fait partie integrante. Il s'agit simultanement d'un etat de connaissance absolue ou l'esprit s'identifie enfin comme etant l'ultime realite, mais aussi un etat de liberte totale dans lequel l'esprit, au lieu d'etre controlee par des forces exterieures, est capable d'organiser le monde d'une facon rationnelle. Il prend alors conscience que le monde est en fait lui-meme, et qu'il lui suffit simplement de mettre en oeuvre ses propres principes de rationalite afin de l'organizer rationalement.”
― Peter Singer

“Istilah gattungswesen menunjuk pada keunikan manusia sebagai makhluk yang mempunyai kesadaran, bukan sekedar kesadaran akan diri sendiri, tetapi juga kesadaran untuk merenungkan kebersamaan, dan menjadi kodratnya sebagai objek pemikiran. Wissenschaft berarti menemukan tentang kebenaran segala hal, dan bildug berarti melatih penduduk baik laki-laki dan perempuan tentang perihal etos yang sesuai dengan bangsa tersebut. Konsep wissenschaft dan bildug memberikan tanggung jawab terhadap gerak sastra untuk memberi pengetahuan mengenai "hal terbaik yang diketahui dan dipikirkan di dunia ini" - Hegel, 1840”
― Kurnia Putra, Eling & Meling; Sejumlah Esai Dalam Kongres Ki Hadjar Dewantara

“In der Bearbeitung der widerständigen Natur und ihrer Unterwerfung unter den ideellen Entwurf, dem sie angepaßt wird, erweist sich in höherer und beständigerer Art die Geisthaftigkeit des Menschen. Indem der Mensch (dienender Arbeiter) der Natur (seinem Wertstück) ihre eigene Form nimmt und ihr eine fremde, menschliche Form aufzwingt, beweist er sichtbar seine Naturüberlegenheit. Im Resultat seiner Arbeit, dem geformten Gegenstand, erblickt er nicht mehr ein ihm Gegenüberstehendes, Fremdes, sondern seinen eigenen, gegenständliche Wirklichkeit gewordenen Plan, sich selbst. Da der von Menschenhand geformte Gegenstand dauert, kann der Mensch aus ihm ständig das Bewußtsein seiner Geistigkeit bzw. Naturüberlegenheit gewinnen.”
― Iring Fetscher, Von Marx Zur Sowjetideologie: Darstellung, Kritik Und Dokumentation Des Sowjetischen, Jugoslawischen Und Chinesischen Marxismus

“This "It gives, there is Being" might emerge somewhat more
clearly once we think out more decisively the giving we have in
mind here. We can succeed by paying heed to the wealth of the·
transformation of what, indeterminately enough, is called Being,
and at the same time is misunderstood in its core as long as it is taken
for the emptiest of all empty concepts. Nor is this representation of
Being as the abstractum par excellence given up in principle, but only
confirmed, when Being as the abstractum par excellence is absorbed
and elevated into the concreteness par excellence ofthe reality ofthe
absolute Spirit-as was accomplished in the most powerful thinking
of modern times, in Hegel's speculative dialectic, and is presented
in his Science of Logic.”
― Heidegger

“Understandable, this all may be an illusion; yet my ambition remains steadfast - to be the most captivating mirage in the panorama.”
― Syed Buali Gillani

“Hegel also pointed out that part of the content of the division of time into past, present, or future seemed able to transcend these temporal units because the parts in question were simply true. Time does not seem to matter to things like triangles or tripods because their qualities are either timeless or eternal. A future triangle would be like any triangle past or present. Truth, in other words, seems either to eradicate time or, at least, to take the temporality out of time. In the terms that Hegel began to establish, Kant’s disquieting claim about the injustice built into time, history, and progress began to look more surmountable. On one side, there was a world made up of moments, some present, some past, some future. The future would turn into the present and negate itself. The present would turn into the past but could still be available in the present. The passage of time and the endless stream of negations of negations built into the human ability to make choices and decisions would give rise to many diferent values, arrangements, and worldviews. Some, however, might turn out to be true. This was the hallmark of the other side of human history. If something was true, it would fall out of time and become, simply, timeless. On Kant’s terms, time and history were the problem. On Hegel’s terms, they were the solution.”
― Michael Sonenscher, After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought

“History is thorough and passes through many stages while bearing an ancient form to its grave. The last stage of a world-historical form is its comedy. The Greek gods, already died once of their wounds in Aeschylus's tragedy Prometheus Bound, were forced to die a second death - this time a comic one - in Lucian's dialogues.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“Some people tout that your liberation is contingent upon your understanding of Hegel. I say our liberation is contingent upon our understanding of self and there is no better teacher than our ancestors. Rather than looking into the pages of books written by our conquerors, I have been seeking out the wisdom of those who have too often been silenced.”
― Lesley-Ann Brown, Decolonial Daughter: Letters from a Black Woman to her European Son

“But it was only after Hegel had died that his philosophy really began to live.”
― Friedrich Engels, Anti-Schelling

“Schelling claims each and every thing he acknowledges in Hegel as his own property”
― Friedrich Engels, Anti-Schelling

“A well-known saying is quoted, allegedly from Hegel, but which, after the above utterances, doubtless stems from Schelling: ‘Only one of my pupils understood me, and even he unfortunately understood me wrongly’.”
― Friedrich Engels, Anti-Schelling

“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

“If there is one thing common to the great modern speculative philosophers, Leibniz, Hegel and Deleuze, it is the risk that re-animating the universe with a non organic life might make it altogether uninhabitable for sane human beings.”
― Christian Kerslake, Deleuze and the Unconscious

“Il est vrai que le discours philosophique, comme l’Histoire, est clos. Ça agace, cette idée. C’est peut-être pourquoi les sages – ceux qui succèdent aux philosophes et dont Hegel est le premier – sont si rares, pour ne pas dire inexistants. Il est vrai que vous ne pouvez accéder à la sagesse que si vous pouvez croire à votre divinité. Or, les gens sains d’esprit sont très rares. Être divin, cela veut dire quoi ? Cela peut être la sagesse stoïcienne ou bien le jeu. Qui joue ? Ce sont les dieux, ils n’ont pas besoin de réagir, alors ils jouent. Ce sont les dieux fainéants !”
― Alexandre Kojève

“Writers who see the existential loneliness of man as I see it – as a longing to be dissolved in the subjectivity of God – have written in ways so obscure that I have real doubts whether I can do any better. I am thinking of Kierkegaard, Levinas and Berdyaev, and also of Hegel, in whose shadow they wrote, and whose vision they confirmed by the very vehemence of their attacks on it.

Hegel argued that we self-conscious beings become what we essentially are, through a process of conflict and resolution. Self-consciousness is implanted in us as a condition to be realized, and we acquire it through Entäusserung – through building the public arena in which the dialogue between self and other can occur. The self becomes real through the recognition of the other. Language, institutions, laws are the vehicles through which we achieve Selbstbestimmung, the certainty of self, which is also a limiting of self and a recognition of the boundary between self and other.

The process that leads me to see myself as other to others also makes me other to myself, and this is the ‘moment’, to use Hegel’s language, of self-alienation, in which subjects become strangers to themselves, bound by external laws, hampered in their freedom and in rebellion against the constraints that press on them from outside.

It is in this way that the fatal fracture splits our world – the fracture between subject and object that runs through me. Healing that fracture means reconciling my own view from somewhere with the competing views by which I am surrounded, so that how I am in the eyes of others matches how I am for myself. For Hegel this is achieved objectively through law and institutions, subjectively through art and religion. These are ways in which we re-connect with the world from which our own struggle for freedom and self-knowledge had separated us. Hölderlin expressed some of this in his great invocations of home and homecoming – the journey outwards, which is also a journey back. And Hölderlin’s spiritual journey has been traced in our time, and through a changed emotional geography, by T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets.”
― Roger Scruton, Face of God: The Gifford Lectures

“Once you have entered the magic circle the sorcerer has drawn around himself, you are lost.”
― Eric Voegelin, On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery

“Em sua interpretação do budismo, Hegel opera, de maneira problemática, com conceitos onto-teo-lógicos como substância, essência, Deus, poder, soberania e criação, que são todos inadequados para o budismo. O nada budista é tudo, menos uma “substância”. Ele não é nem “em si essente” nem [algo que] “repousa e permanece em si mesmo”. Antes, ele é, por assim dizer, em si vazio. Ele não foge à determinação para se recolher em seu interior infinito. O nada budista não se deixa determinar como aquela “força substancial” que “rege o mundo e permite que tudo se origine e venha a ser segundo uma ordenação [Zusammenhang] racional”. O nada significa, antes, que nada domina. Ele não se exterioriza como um senhor. Dele não parte nenhuma “soberania”, nenhum “poder”. Buda não representa nada. Ele não encarna a substância infinita em uma singularização individual. Hegel emaranha de maneira inadmissível o nada budista em uma relação representacional e causal. O seu pensamento, que se dirige à “substância” e ao “sujeito”, não concebe apreender o nada budista.”
― Byung-Chul Han, Filosofía del budismo Zen

“Whilst the bureaucracy is on the one hand this crass materialism, it manifests its crass spiritualism in the fact that it wants to do everything, i.e., by making the will the causa prima. For it is purely an active form of existence and receives its content from without and can prove its existence, therefore, only by shaping and restricting this content. For the bureaucrat the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him. (from "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law")”
― Karl Marx

“Truth is found neither in the communizer yuri nor the fascist homoslop, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Metaphysics of the German Spirit