Phenomenology of Spirit Quotes

“It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; . . . the individual who has not staked his or her life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he or she has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“The anti-human, the merely animal, consists in staying within the sphere of feeling, and being able to communicate only at that level". (1807, § 69).”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“The vanity of the contents” of individual experience is scrutable as an inessential trapping drawn into a matter by vested interests “…since it is at the same time the vanity of the self that knows itself to be vain”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“It is not a very pleasing spectacle to observe uncultivated ignorance and crudity of mind, with neither form nor taste, without the capacity to concentrate its thoughts on an abstract proposition, still less on a connected statement of such propositions, confidently proclaiming itself to be intellectual freedom and”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind

“Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“The life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself…Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“is—it is necessary to come first to an understanding concerning knowledge, which is looked upon as the instrument by which to take possession of the Absolute, or as the means through which to get a sight of it.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit

“We must hold to the conviction that it is the nature of truth to prevail when its time has come, and that it appears only when this time has come, and therefore never appears prematurely, nor finds a public not ripe to receive it; also we must accept that the individual needs that this should be so in order to verify what is as yet a matter for himself alone, and to experience the conviction, which in the first place belongs only to a particular individual, as something universally held.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“To judge a thing that has substance and solid worth is quite easy, to comprehend it is much harder, and to blend judgement and comprehension in a definitive description is the hardest thing of all.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“The truth is the whole.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“There are two aspects to merely clever argumentation that call for further notice and which are to be contrasted with conceptually comprehending thinking. On the one hand, merely clever argumentation conducts itself negatively towards the content apprehended; it knows how to refute it and reduce it to nothing. It says, “This is not the way it is”; this insight is the merely negative; it is final, and it does not itself go beyond itself to a new content. Rather, if it is again to have any content, something other from somewhere else has to be found. It is reflection into the empty I, the vanity of its own knowing. – What this vanity expresses is not only that this content is vain but also that this insight itself is vain, for it is the negative which catches no glimpse of the positive within itself. Because this reflection does not gain its negativity itself for its content, it is not immersed in the subject matter at all but is always above and beyond it, and thus it imagines that by asserting the void, it is going much further than the insight which was so rich in content. On the other hand, as was formerly pointed out, in comprehensive thinking, the negative belongs to the content itself and is the positive, both as its immanent movement and determination and as the totality of these. Taken as a result, it is the determinate negative which emerges out of this movement and is likewise thereby a positive content.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change. The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“Das Widermenschliche, das Tierische besteht darin, im Gefühle stehen zu bleiben und nur durch dieses sich mitteilen zu können.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“The outcome is the same as the beginning only because the beginning is an end.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“All the same, while proof is essential in the case of mathematical knowledge, it still does not have the significance and nature of being a moment in the result itself; the proof is over when we get the result, and has disappeared. The process of mathematical proof does not belong to the object; it is a function that takes place outside the matter in hand.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“Consciousness knows something; this something is the essence or is per se. This object, however, is also the per se, the inherent reality, for consciousness. Hence comes ambiguity of this truth. Consciousness, as we see, has now two objects: one is the first per se, the second is the existence for consciousness of this per se. The last object appears at first sight to be merely the reflection of consciousness into itself, i.e. an idea not of an object, but solely of its knowledge of that first object. But, as was already indicated, by that very process the first object is altered; it ceases to be what is per se, and becomes consciously something which is per se only for consciousness. Consequently, then, what this real per se is for consciousness is truth: which, however, means that this is the essential reality, or the object which consciousness has. This new object contains the nothingness of the first; the new object is the experience concerning that first object.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“Such minds, when they give themselves up to the uncontrolled ferment of [the divine] substance, imagine that, by drawing a veil over self-consciousness and surrendering understanding they become the beloved of God to whom He gives wisdom in sleep; and hence what they in fact receive, and bring to birth in their sleep, is nothing but dreams.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“The more the ordinary mind takes the opposition between true and false to be fixed, the more is it accustomed to expect either agreement or contradiction with a given philosophical system, and only to see reason for the one or the other in any explanatory statement concerning such a system. It does not conceive the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive evolution of truth; rather, it sees only contradiction in that variety.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit

“Nature, withdrawing into its essence, deposes its living, self-particularizing, self-entangling manifold existence to the level of an unessential husk, which is the covering for the inner being; and this inner being is, in the first instance, still simple darkness, the unmoved, the black, formless stone.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“from the chalice of this realm of spirits
foams forth Him his own infinitude.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“What is familiar and well known as such is not really known for the very reason that it is familiar and well known.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes

“La belleza carente de fuerza odia al entendimiento porque éste exige de ella lo que no está en condiciones de dar. Pero la vida del espíritu no es la vida que se asusta ante la muerte y se mantiene pura de la desolación, sino la que sabe afrontarla y mantenerse en ella. El espíritu sólo conquista su verdad cuando es capaz de encontrarse a sí mismo en el absoluto desgarramiento. El espíritu no es esta potencia como lo positivo que se aparta de lo negativo, como cuando decimos de algo que no es nada o que es falso y, hecho esto, pasamos sin más a otra cosa, sino que sólo es esta potencia cuando mira cara a cara a lo negativo y permanece cerca de ello. Esta permanencia [en lo negativo] es la fuerza mágica que hace que lo negativo vuelva al ser.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“por lo poco que el espíritu necesita para contentarse, puede medirse la extensión de lo que ha perdido.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“Self-conscious mind has not merely passed beyond that to the opposite extreme of insubstantial reflection of self into self, but beyond this too. It has not merely lost its essential and concrete life, it is also conscious of this loss and of the transitory finitude characteristic of its content”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit

“Universal liberty can’t produce any work
or any positive action, only negative action. Universal liberty is only the rush to erase.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“Este movimiento dialéctico que ejerce la conciencia sobre sí misma, tanto en su saber como en su objeto, en la medida en que de él surge para ella su nuevo y verdadero objeto es propiamente aquello que denominamos experiencia. Desde este punto de vista, en el proceso recién descrito todavía hay que destacar un momento que puede arrojar una nueva luz sobre el aspecto científico de la presentación que haremos a continuación. La conciencia sabe algo, este objeto es la esencia o el en-sí; pero también es el en-sí para la conciencia; con esto surge la ambigüedad de esta verdad. Ya vemos que ahora la conciencia tiene dos objetos, uno el primer en-sí, otro el ser para-ella de este en-sí. El segundo sólo parece a primera vista la reflexión de la conciencia en sí misma, una representación no de un objeto, sino únicamente de su saber del primer objeto. Lo que pasa, como se ha mostrado antes, es que el primer objeto se altera, deja de ser el en-sí y se convierte para la conciencia en un objeto que sólo es el en-sí para ella. Pero con esto el ser para ella de ese en-sí es lo verdadero, lo que significa que es la esencia o su objeto. Este nuevo objeto contiene la anulación del primero, es la experiencia hecha sobre él.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“Wahrheit heißt Übereinstimmung des Begriffs mit seiner Wirklichkeit.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit