War is progress, peace is stagnation.
Nothing great has been and nothing great can be accomplished without passion. It is only a dead, too often, indeed, a hypocriticalmoralizing which inveighs against the form of passion as such.
Destiny is consciousness of oneself, but consciousness of oneself as an enemy.
World history is a court of judgment.
It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value.
The Few assume to be the deputies, but they are often only the despoilers of the Many.
Education to independence demands that young people should be accustomed early to consult their own sense of propriety and their own reason. To regard study as mere receptivity and memory work is to have a most incomplete view of what instruction means.
The essence of the modern state is the union of the universal with the full freedom of the particular, and with the welfare of individuals.
The people are that part of the state that does not know what it wants.
On the stage on which we are observing it, – Universal History – Spirit displays itself in its most concrete reality.
Reason is just as cunning as she is powerful. Her cunning consists principally in her mediating activity, which, by causing objects to act and re-act on each other in accordance with their own nature, in this way, without any direct interference in the process, carries out reason’s intentions.
Science and knowledge, especially that of philosophy, came from the Arabs into the West.
The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and the Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third, Monarchy.
Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature.
The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.
Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me.
When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength.
The person must give himself an external sphere of freedom in order to have being as Idea.
Life has value only when it has something valuable as its object.
The people will learn to feel the dignity of man. They will not merely demand their rights, which have been trampled in the dust, but themselves will take them – make them their own.