Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831)
German philosopher, most famous for attempting to elaborate a comprehensive and systematic ontology from a logical starting point.
Abstraktionen in der Wirklichkeit geltend machen, heißt Wirklichkeit zerstören.
Reading the morning newspaper is the realist's morning prayer. One orients one's attitude toward the world either by God or by what the world is. The former gives as much security as the latter, in that one knows how one stands.
History is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it.
If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right. Further, if I were to say that this summus philosophus ... scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal before him, so that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called Phenomenology of the Mind, without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an inmate for Bedlam, I should be no less right.
This final aim is God's purpose with the world; but God is the absolutely perfect Being, and can, therefore, will nothing but himself.
Aims, principles, &c., have a place in our thoughts, in our subjective design only; but not yet in the sphere of reality. That which exists for itself only, is a possibility, a potentiality; but has not yet emerged into Existence. A second element must be introduced in order to produce actuality — viz. actuation, realization; and whose motive power is the Will — the activity of man in the widest sense.