Hegel's best-known sentences
The top 3 according to 0 votes from people: The true is the whole. · The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. · When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old.. (Updated Dec 25, 2025.)
'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.
Automatically translated (original in Deutsch). See the original
Top 12
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1
The true is the whole.
Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), preface.
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2
The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), preface.
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3
When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), preface.
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4
The state is the actuality of the ethical idea.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, § 257.
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5
Passionate love and marriage are two different things.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, § 162.
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6
Impatience demands the impossible: reaching the goal without the means.
Phenomenology of Spirit (1807).
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7
This fear of erring is already the error itself.
Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), introduction.
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8
World history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom.
Lectures on the Philosophy of History.
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9
World history is not the soil of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it.
Lectures on the Philosophy of History.
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10
The courage of truth, faith in the power of spirit, is the first condition of philosophy.
Lectures on the History of Philosophy.
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11
Who thinks abstractly? The uneducated man, not the educated.
'Who Thinks Abstractly?' (1807), published posthumously.
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12
Whoever wants something great must, as Goethe says, know how to limit himself.
Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, § 80, addition.
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