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 history of the world is none other than the progress of the, consciousness of freedom.
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.
Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.
The true is the whole.
In the Soul is the awaking of Consciousness: Consciousness sets itself up as Reason, awaking at one bound to the sense of its rationality: and this Reason by its activity emancipates itself to objectivity and the consciousness of its intelligent unity.
The man whom philosophy leaves cold, and the man whom real faith does not illuminate, may be assured that the fault lies in them, not in knowledge and faith. The former is still an alien to philosophy, the latter an alien to faith.
The beginning of religion, more precisely its content, is the concept of religion itself, that God is the absolute truth, the truth of all things, and subjectively that religion alone is the absolutely true knoweldge.