G.W.F. Hegel Quotes

Quotes by and about G.W.F. Hegel

(Continued from his main entry on the site.)

Hegel: "To be able to read Homer in their own language is the greatest gift that can be given to a people."

Hegel: "The force of mind is only as great as its expression."

Hegel: "Das Wahre ist das Ganze."
("The truth is the whole.")

Hegel: "To be a follower of Spinoza is essential. ... You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all."

Hegel: "Kant is a rabid expression of what Socrates started."

Hegel: "Dialectics gives expression to a law which is felt in all grades of consciousness and in general experience. Everything that surrounds us may be viewed as an instance of dialectic."

Hegel: "Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down ... to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings."

Hegel: "The heart is everywhere, and each part of [an] organism is ... of the heart itself."

Hegel: "A philosophy without heart and a faith without intellect are abstractions from the true life of knowledge and faith. 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."

Walter Kaufmann: "[Hegel] wanted something that was more full-blooded than Kant's purely rational [philosophy]."

Walter Kaufmann: "[In his books] Hegel offers us what Richard Wagner was later to call a Gesamtkunstwerk [total work of art], leaving out little but music."

Isaak Winkel-Holm: "[In Hegel's writing] multiple metaphors collide."