# Hegel's best-known sentences

'The true is the whole', the owl of Minerva and world history as progress in the consciousness of freedom: Hegel's best-known sentences from the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Philosophy of Right and his lectures, with their source.

- 0 votes · 12 items
- Dec 25, 2025 · naschkatze_ruhrpott
- https://even.best/en/l/4707/hegel-s-best-known-sentences

## Top 12

1. **The true is the whole.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), preface.
2. **The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), preface.
3. **When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), preface.
4. **The state is the actuality of the ethical idea.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Elements of the Philosophy of Right, § 257.
5. **Passionate love and marriage are two different things.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Elements of the Philosophy of Right, § 162.
6. **Impatience demands the impossible: reaching the goal without the means.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Phenomenology of Spirit (1807).
7. **This fear of erring is already the error itself.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), introduction.
8. **World history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Lectures on the Philosophy of History.
9. **World history is not the soil of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Lectures on the Philosophy of History.
10. **The courage of truth, faith in the power of spirit, is the first condition of philosophy.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Lectures on the History of Philosophy.
11. **Who thinks abstractly? The uneducated man, not the educated.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — 'Who Thinks Abstractly?' (1807), published posthumously.
12. **Whoever wants something great must, as Goethe says, know how to limit himself.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, § 80, addition.

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