Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Reality Quotations

All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State. . . For Truth is the unity of the universal and subjective will; and the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth. We have in it, therefore, the object of history in a more definite shape than before; that in which Freedom obtains objectivity.

On the stage on which we are observing it, — Universal History — Spirit displays itself in its most concrete reality.

To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality.

Since philosophy is the exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the apprehension of the present and the actual, not the erection of a beyond, supposed to exist, God knows where, or rather which exists, and we can perfectly well say where, namely in the error of a one-sided, empty, ratiocination.

What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational. On this conviction the plain man like the philosopher takes his stand,and from it philosophy starts in its study of the universe of mind as well as the universe of nature.

The State is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State.