To him who looks at the world rationally the world looks rationally back.
Beauty is merely the Spiritual making itself known sensuously.
History is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it.
Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.
Every idea, extended into infinity, becomes its own opposite.
Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.
No man is a hero to his valet de chamber.
Too fair to worship, too divine to love.
Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary.
Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself.
India has created a special momentum in world history as a country to be searched for knowledge.
The courage of the truth is the first condition of philosophic study.
Whatever is reasonable is true, and whatever is true is reasonable.
America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself.
The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in everything.
The Catholics had been in the position of oppressors, and the Protestants of the oppressed.
Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as it is to fancy that an individual can overleap his own age, jump over Rhodes.
No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is a valet.
Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized – the question involuntarily arises – to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.
Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.