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

“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

“Kierkegaard said, 'Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.' If you don’t solve the problem of life, you won’t know what life to lead, and your experiences will be no more informative than those of animals. Why are so many people feeling lost? Why is there a mental health pandemic? Why can’t people find meaning and fulfilment in their lives? It’s because they spend all their time experiencing life and none at all solving the problem of life. They are blind little Kierkegaardians – clueless people making desperate leaps of faith. Kierkegaard hated Hegel. Hegelianism was exactly what Kierkegaard lacked!”
― David Sinclair, The Lost Superpowers of Ancient Humanity: In Search of the Prometheans

“The world is an estranged and untrue world so long as man does not destroy its dead objectivity and recognize himself and his own life 'behind' the fixed form of things and laws. When he finally wins this self-consciousness, he is on his way not only to the truth of himself, but also of his world. And with the recognition goes the doing. He will try to put this truth into action, and make the world what it essentially is, namely, the fulfillment of man's self-consciousness.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“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

“It seems as if historicist ideas easily become prominent in times of great social change. They appeared when Greek tribal life broke up, as well as when that of the Jews was shattered by the impact of the Babylonian conquest. There can be little doubt, I believe, that Heraclitus’ philosophy is an expression of a feeling of drift; a feeling which seems to be a typical reaction to the dissolution of the ancient tribal forms of social life. In modern Europe, historicist ideas were revived during the industrial revolution, and especially through the impact of the political revolutions in America and France. It appears to be more than a mere coincidence that Hegel, who adopted so much of Heraclitus’ thought and passed it on to all modern historicist movements, was a mouthpiece of the reaction against the French Revolution.”
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume One: The Spell of Plato

“God is simply all souls together, while 'the Devil' is all souls apart (leading to conflict, hate and evil). Creation is what all souls together construct to explore their deepest nature and come to self-awareness. Souls start off united, and then create maximum disunity: the Big Bang. Then they dialectically work to come back into unity. They alienate themselves from themselves in order to understand themselves, to come to consciousness of themselves and their purpose and meaning, and then they return to themselves, but at a much higher level, a divine level. They have found themselves. They have come home. The broken mirror of God has reassembled and God can once again see its own reflection and know exactly what and why it is.”
― Steve Madison, Soul Science: Know Your Soul

“People believe in miracles, precisely because they don’t believe in miracles.”
― Syed Buali Gillani

“When Proudhon (1809–65) offered his ‘Philosophy of Poverty’ (La Philosophie de la Misère) to Marx for criticism, Marx thought this bourgeois socialism dangerous: ‘To leave error unrefuted is to encourage intellectual immorality.’ He wrote a tremendous attack on Proudhon: the ‘Poverty of Philosophy’ (1847), which was the first exposition of Marxist philosophy and ‘the bitterest attack delivered by one thinker upon another since the celebrated polemics of the
Renaissance’.

It is also immensely funny. Marx was concerned to show that Proudhon did not understand the Hegelian dialectic. Proudhon saw it as struggle between good and evil, therefore he would formulate the problem thus: preserve the good side, eliminate the bad. But then, says Marx, the dialectical process would stop. ‘What constitutes dialectical movement is the co-existence of two contradictory sides, their conflict and their fusion into a new category.

The very formulation of the problem as one of eliminating the bad side cuts short the dialectic movement.’ This implies the primacy of contradiction. ‘Genuine progress is constituted not by the triumph of one side and the defeat of the other, but by the duel itself which necessarily involves the destruction of both.”
― Martin Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers in International Theory: Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant, and Mazzini

“And if there is one sure sign in Hegel’s philosophy that history isn’t over, of course it’s a war. Because there are embodied people in struggle with different views about what freedom is and how to live.”
― Rick Roderick

“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