Quotes by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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Every work of art belongs to its time, to its people, to its environment, and depends on particular historical representations and purposes or on other representations and purposes.

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Art... to express and bring to consciousness the deepest interests of man, the most penetrating truths of the spirit.

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Philosophy and art... are close spiritual spheres, they are ways of expressing... the deepest interests of man, the most comprehensive truths of the spirit. In works of art peoples have stored their inner representations and intuitions richest in valuable content, and the key to the understanding of wisdom and religion is often given by the fine arts, and, in some peoples, exclusively by them.

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Morality is a form of obedience in freedom.

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Aid must not be granted against the will of the recipient.

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The truth is spoken at the right place and time when it contributes to the accomplishment of a thing.

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The law leaves complete freedom to the disposition. Morality, however, refers to disposition and requires that the deed be done out of respect for duty. Consequently, the manner of acting in accordance with the law is also moral, if it is determined by respect for the law.

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Regarding morality, the only truth lies in the words of the sages of antiquity: to be moral is to live according to the customs of your country.

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The mind can be formed without the heart, and the heart without the mind; there are one-sided, irrational hearts and heartless minds.

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Language is an extraordinarily powerful tool, but you have to be smart to use it.

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The most important need is the need to know the truth.

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The free man is not envious, but joyfully recognizes that something is great and sublime, and rejoices in its existence.

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Authentic works of art are immortal and remain accessible, giving pleasure in all times and to all peoples.

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In the first place, a behavior in accordance with the law and a moral disposition must be acquired; only then will moral behavior as such arise, without any kind of legislative prescriptions.

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Morality must appear under the guise of beauty.

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Morality is the reason of the will.

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The moral man is aware of the necessary content of his activity... and this does not cause any damage to his freedom, on the contrary, only thanks to awareness does this become a real and substantial freedom, in contrast to lawlessness which represents a freedom devoid of content and only possible.

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Man's obligations are divided into four categories: obligation to himself, to the family, to the state and to other people in general.

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One of the fundamental definitions of the principle of honor is that no one should give others, by his actions, an advantage over himself.

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The answer to the questions that leave philosophy unanswered is that the questions must be formulated differently.

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To the pedantic moralist it may be said that conscience is a torch of morality, which illuminates the right path; and when it deviates from this path, it is extinguished.

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The first necessary relationships in which a person comes into contact with others are family relationships. These relationships, it is true, also have a legal side, but this is subject to the moral side, the principle of love and trust.

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In relationships with friends you must be as little a burden as possible. The most delicate thing would be not to ask your friends for any favors.

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The connection between two people of opposite sexes, called marriage, is not only a natural animal union and not only a civil contract, but primarily a moral union, created on the basis of feelings of love and mutual trust, which transforms the spouses in a whole.

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Minerva's owl only flies at dusk.

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Man must respect himself and consider himself worthy of something as high as possible. He cannot exaggerate in his own thoughts the supremacy and courage of the spirit.

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Man is nothing but the string of his deeds.

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Man will not become master of nature until he becomes master of himself.

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Mankind was freed not so much from enslavement as through enslavement. For brutality, avarice, injustice are the essence of evil; the man who does not free himself from evil is not capable of morality, and discipline deprived him precisely of this desire.

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What is debt? For now, we have no other answer than the following: the fact of doing something right and taking care of one's own good and that of others.

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In regard to a particular vocation, which seems to be destiny, the form of external necessity must be removed. You must choose your destiny freely, resist it and realize it.

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For my deed to have moral worth, my trust must be connected with it. An act done out of fear of punishment or out of a desire to create a good impression of oneself is not moral.

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For the deed to have a moral value, we must determine whether it is just or unjust, whether it is good or bad.

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Man is immortal thanks to knowledge. Knowledge, thought forms the root of life and its immortality.

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Man must not fear the external force that overwhelms him, but the moral power that determines his free thought [...] so that, by speaking out against it, man rebels against himself.

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Character is determining the form of will and interest that make you important.

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Conscience, unlike laws, is disenfranchised within the state; man cannot appeal to conscience, for one has one conscience, and another - another. In order for a just conscience to exist, it is necessary that what he considers to be just, is objectively so.

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Happy is he who has arranged his existence in such a way that it corresponds to the particularities of his character.

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The secret of happiness lies in the ability to get out of the circle of your own "I".

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Talent without genius does not rise much above the level of mere virtuosity.

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Because marriage contains feelings, it is not absolute, but unstable, containing within itself the possibility of dissolution. But legislation should at the highest level prevent the realization of this possibility and protect morality against caprice.

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Only one man understood me; but even that, to be honest, didn't understand me.

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Only by achieving the greatest goals does a person discover in himself a strong character that becomes a support for those around him.

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The obstinate insists on his position only because it is his position, he insists on it without a reasonable basis, that is, without his position representing anything of universal value.

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Shame is the beginning of anger against what should not happen. Shame is mild anger at yourself because it contains in itself a reaction to the contradiction between what you are and what you should and want to be.

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Nothing great in the world is done without passion.

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Needing, in itself, is not the same as having. It depends on his will if he wants to present himself as needy. He will only want this if he is convinced that I will consider him my equal.

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True compassion is reliving the moral justification of the sufferer.

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Man is forced to fight with necessity, established by nature. His moral duty is to conquer freedom through his own actions and judgments.

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When a man performs a moral deed, he cannot be considered, on that alone, a virtuous person; he is virtuous only if this behavior is the basic feature of his character.

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The moral principle is primarily about mindset and intention. But here it is important that not only the intention but also the deed be good.

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We must desire something great, but we must be able to create something great; otherwise, this is an insignificant wish. The laurels of a single wish are dry leaves that were never green.

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As will is necessary to him who perseveres in the attainment of a reasonable end, so obstinacy is repulsive.

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It is not what exists that arouses our sense of impatience and suffering, but the fact that it is not as it should be.

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It is not noble to hide the truth when you have to tell it, because that way you humiliate yourself and those around you. But you must not speak the truth, if it is not meant for those who listen or if they have no right to hear it.

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Politeness is a sign of goodwill and consent to do service, especially to those with whom we are not in close relations of friendship or friendship.

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The external fact does not differ from the internal one. In a bad deed and intention is essentially bad and not good.

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A will that decides nothing is not a real will: one without character never reaches solutions.

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Education aims to make man an independent being, that is, a being with a free will.

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For he who himself is not free, neither are others free.

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Friendship is based on the similarity of characters and interests in a common thing and not on the pleasure you get from the person of another.

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Virtue became an art that must and could be acquired, but whose fate proved to be strange: while the other arts were perfected and one generation learned from another, only morality evidently did not spread, in this situation everyone has to learn from the beginning, without being able to use the experience of previous generations.

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Inspiration is nothing but the state of one who, seized with inspiration, immerses himself completely in a thing, is completely absorbed by it, and who does not rest until he finds a suitable artistic form, until he is given a final chiseling, until it is brought to completion.

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In the first years of life, the most important is maternal education, because morality must be implanted in a child as a feeling.

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To be one's own master and slave seems a privilege compared to the situation in which man is another man's slave.

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Marriage is a legal love; by this definition, everything that is fleeting, capricious and subjective is excluded from love.

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Wisdom consists in not destroying the state of others and preserving it for its own sake.

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Wisdom presupposes that self-benefit should not be seen as the goal of moral conduct, although it may be a consequence of it.

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If the will clings only to trifles, to something devoid of content, it turns into stubbornness. The latter resembles the character, but does not have its content.

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The foolish man follows his inclinations and, because of them, forgets his obligations.

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The foolish man considers it necessary to fulfill his obligations, but has no will to guide his inclinations and habits.

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Virtue is something universal, required of all people, not something innate, but something acquired by the individual as a result of his own activity.

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Everyone wants to be better than the surrounding world and considers himself better than it. He who is truly better embodies this world better than others.

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Every work of art belongs to its time, its people, its environment.

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Concerning morality: its supremacy consists in succeeding in having the guilt and suffering of our hearts buried in it, and the heart becoming its own tomb.

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Character is primarily that formal part of the energy with which man, without deviating from the already chosen path, pursues his goals and interests, preserving in all his actions his agreement with himself.

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Every man must...be asked to discover his character. A man of character imposes himself on others, because they know who they are dealing with in his person.

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True politeness should be seen as a duty, for we should generally have a benevolent attitude towards others.

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True personal benefit is achieved only through moral behavior.

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The truth of the means lies in their adequacy to the end.

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Art has an extremely active part in the realization of the aims of reason, for it prepares the ground for morality, so that when it comes it finds half the work already done, namely, liberation from the yoke of sensibility.

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Evil is nothing but the inconsistency between "being" and "ought."

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If the facts contradict my theory, then so much the worse for the facts.

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If a man chooses as his goal something transitory, that is, non-essential, insignificant, it is an interest directed not to the given thing, but to himself... Such is, for example, moral vanity, when a man relies in his actions on his superiority and generally shows more interest in himself than in the work at hand.

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The ideal represents any reality in the form of its highest truth.

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Of all the immoral attitudes, the attitude that children are considered like slaves is the most immoral.

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Of all responsibilities to others, the most important is honesty in word and deed.

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The more the imitation resembles the natural model, the colder our admiration will be, the more it can turn into boredom or disgust.

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History teaches us that humanity learns nothing from history.

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The self is the content of the relationship and, at the same time, the creator of the relationship itself.

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The real tragedy is not in the conflict between truth and injustice, but between truth and truth. However, this is difficult for anyone who knows only one absolute truth, his own, to accept. The fate of such a person is terror. From the mistake and the admission.

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We think in words, because thought owes its highest and truest existence to the word.

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Whoever looks at the world rationally, the world also looks at him rationally.