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April 10, 2026
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"It is because the method of physics does not satisfy the comprehension that we have to go on further."
"Not only must philosophy be in agreement with our empirical knowledge of Nature, but the origin and formation of the Philosophy of Nature presupposes and is conditioned by empirical physics. However, the course of a science's origin and the preliminaries of its construction are one thing, while the science itself is another. In the latter, the former can no longer appear as the foundation of the science; here, the foundation must be the necessity of the Concept."
"The heart is everywhere, and each part of the organism is only the specialized force of the heart itself."
"Was vernĂźnftig ist, das ist Wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernĂźnftig."
"Jede Vorstellung ist eine Verallgemeinerung, und diese gehĂśrt dem Denken an. Etwas allgemein machen, heiĂt, es denken. ("Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse", Berlin, 1833, p. 35)"
"Die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug."
"The owl of Minerva first begins her flight with the onset of dusk."
"Only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering."
"Die Person muĂ sich eine äuĂere Sphäre ihrer Freiheit geben, um als Idee zu sein."
"The external embodiment of an act is composed of many parts, and may be regarded as capable of being divided into an infinite number of particulars. An act may be looked on as in the first instance coming into contact with only one of these particulars. But the truth of the particular is the universal. A definite act is not confined in its content to one isolated point of the varied external world, but is universal, including these varied relations within itself. The purpose, which is the product of thought and embraces not the particular only but also the universal side, is intention."
"The good is the idea, or unity of the conception of the will with the particular will. Abstract right, well-being, the subjectivity of consciousness, and the contingency of external reality, are in their independent and separate existences superseded in this unity, although in their real essence they are contained in it and preserved. This unity is realized freedom, the absolute final cause of the world. Addition.âEvery stage is properly the idea, but the earlier steps contain the idea only in more abstract form. The I, as person, is already the idea, although in its most abstract guise. The good is the idea more completely determined; it is the unity of the conception of will with the particular will. It is not something abstractly right, but has a real content, whose substance constitutes both right and well-being."
"The essence of the modern state is the union of the universal with the full freedom of the particular, and with the welfare of individuals."
"So ist vielmehr der Fall, daĂ das Volk, insosern mit diesem Worte ein besonderer Theil der Mitglieder eines Staats bezeichnet ist, den Theil ausdrĂźckt, der nicht weiĂ was er will."
"To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great or rational whether in life or in science. Great achievement is assured, however, of subsequent recognition and grateful acceptance by public opinion, which in due course will make it one of its own prejudices"
"What the English call âcomfortableâ is something endless and inexhaustible. Every condition of comfort reveals in turn its discomfort, and these discoveries go on for ever. Hence the new want is not so much a want of those who have it directly, but is created by those who hope to make profit from it."
"Nicht die Neugierde, nicht die Eitelkeit, nicht die Betrachtung der NĂźtzlichkeit, nicht die Pflicht und Gewissenhaftigkeit, sondern ein unauslĂśschlicher, unglĂźcklicher Durst, der sich auf keinen Vergleich einläĂt, fĂźhrt uns zur Wahrheit."
"The great thing however is, in the show of the temporal and the transient to recognize the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present. For the work of Reason (which is synonymous with the Idea) when considered in its own actuality, is to simultaneously enter external existence and emerge with an infinite wealth of forms, phenomena and phases â a multiplicity that envelops its essential rational kernel with a motley outer rind with which our ordinary consciousness is earliest at home. It is this rind that the Concept must penetrate before Reason can find its own inward pulse and feel it still beating even in the outward phases. But this infinite variety of circumstances which is formed in this element of externality by the light of the rational essence shining in it â all this infinite material, with its regulatory laws â is not the object of philosophy....To comprehend what is, is the task of philosophy: and what is is Reason."
"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."
"Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality. Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself."
"To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them."
"In Mohammedanism the narrow principle of the Jews is expanded into universality and thereby overcome. Here, God is no longer, as in the Far East, regarded as existent in an immediately sensory way but is conceived as the one infinite power elevated above all the multiplicity of the world. Mohammedanism is, therefore, in the strictest sense of the word, the religion of sublimity."
"Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob."
"So muĂ die Philosophie zwar die MĂśglichkeit erkennen, daĂ das Volk sich zu ihr erhebt, aber sie muĂ sich nicht zum Volk erniedrigen."
"There are Plebes in all classes."
"Philosophie ... hat zwar ihre Gegenstände zunächst mit der Religion gemeinschaftlich. Beide haben die Wahrheit zu ihrem Gegenstande, und zwar im hÜchsten Sinne - in dem, daà Gott die Wahrheit und er allein die Wahrheit ist."
"India has always been an object of yearning, a realm of wonder, a world of magic... India is the land of dreams. India had always dreamt - more of the Bliss that is man's final goal. And this has helped India to be more creative in history than any other nation. Hence the effervescence of myths and legends, religious and philosophies, music, and dances and the different styles of architecture." ..."
"India has created a special momentum in world history as a country to be searched for."
"It strikes everyone in beginning to form an acquaintance with the treasures of Indian literature, that a land so rich in intellectual products and those of the profoundest order of thought...""
"India as a land of Desire formed an essential element in general history. From the most ancient times downwards, all nations have directed their wishes and longings to gaining access to the treasures of this land of marvels, the most costly which the earth presents, treasures of nature - pearls, diamonds, perfumes, rose essences, lions, elephants, etc. - as also treasures of wisdom. The way by which these treasures have passed to the West has at all times been a matter of world historical importance bound up with the fate of nations."
"Without being known too well, it [India] has existed for millennia in the imagination of the Europeans as a wonderland. Its fame, which it has always had with regard to its treasures, both its natural ones, and in particular, its wisdom, has lured men there."
"Hegel showed a far more modem approach when, during the same period, he compared the discovery of Sanskrit to that of a new continent because, in his view, it established "historic ties between the German and Indian peoples with all the certainty that can be required in dealing with such a subject" .&1 It was for this reason that he promoted the grand conception of the Indians as colonizers of Europe to the rank of irrefutable fact, in contrast to the fabulations (Erdichtungen) with which history is familiar: In the cohesion between the languages of peoples so widely separated from each other ... we are faced with an outcome which shows us that the dispersion of these peoples, starting from Asia, and their distinct evolution beginning with the same common ancestry, is an irrefutable fact (unwidersprechliches Faktum). This has nothing to do with hypothetical combinations of circumstances, great or small, which have enriched history with so many fabulations presented as facts, and which will continue to do so, since fresh combinations of the same circumstances, or of these with others, will always be possible."
"Das Schicksal des jĂźdischen Volkes ist das Schicksal Makbeths, der aus der Natur selbst trat, sich an fremde Wesen hing, und so in ihrem Dienste alles Heilige der menschlichen Natur zertreten und ermorden, von seinen GĂśttern (denn es waren Objekte, er war Knecht) endlich verlassen, und an seinem Glauben selbst zerschmettert werden muĂte."
"Between the Shaman of the Tungus, the European prelate who rules church and state, the Voguls, and the Puritans, on the one hand, and the man who listens to his own command of duty, on the other, the difference is not that the former make themselves slaves, while the latter is free, but that the former have their lord outside themselves, while the latter carries his lord in himself, yet at the same time is his own slave."
"The inclination to act as the laws command, a virtue, is a synthesis in which the law ... loses its universality and the subject its particularity; both lose their opposition, while in the Kantian conception of virtue this opposition remains, and the universal becomes the master and the particular the mastered."
"In the âfulfillmentâ of both the laws and duty, ... the moral disposition ceases to be the universal, opposed to inclination, and inclination ceases to be particular, opposed to the law."
"A command can express no more than an ought or a shall, because it is a universal, but it does not express an âisâ; and this at once makes plain its deficiency. Against such commands Jesus sets virtue, i.e., a loving disposition, which makes the content of the command superfluous and destroys its form as a command, because that form implies an opposition between a commander and something resisting the command."
"A more thorough study of Euclid's axioms and postulates proved them to be inadequate for the deduction of Euclid's geometry. ...Hilbert and others succeeded in filling the gap by stating explicitly a complete system of postulates for Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries alike. Among the postulates missing in Euclid's list was the celebrated postulate of Archimedes, according to which, by placing an indefinite number of equal lengths end to end along a line, we should eventually pass any point arbitrarily selected on the line. Hilbert, by denying this postulate, just as Lobatchewski and Riemann had denied Euclid's parallel postulate, succeeded in constructing a new geometry known as non-Archimedean. It was perfectly consistent but much stranger than the classical non-Euclidean varieties. Likewise, it was proved possible to posit a system of postulates which would yield Euclidean or non-Euclidean geometries of any number of dimensions; hence, so far as rational requirements of the mind were concerned, there was no reason to limit geometry to three dimensions."
"Hilbert's problems have the characteristics of any good founding document. Each one is a short essay on its subject, not overly specific, and yet Hilbert makes his intent remarkably clear. He leaves room for change and adjustment. Hilbert's goal was to foster the pursuit of mathematics."
"Hilbert was on the verge of retirement. He was the dignified chairman of the mathematical society's meetings, though he no longer came up with those caustic quips that people would repeat afterwards, imitating as best they could his Baltic accent. It is a pity these were not recorded before it was too late. The samples cited in English translation, in Constance Reid's biography of Hilbert, give only the palest idea of his biting wit."
"If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann hypothesis been proven?"
"If one were to bring ten of the wisest men in the world together and ask them what was the most stupid thing in existence, they would not be able to discover anything so stupid as astrology."
""Mathematics is a presuppositionless science. To found it I do not need God, as does Kronecker, or the assumption of a special faculty of our understanding attuned to the principle of mathematical induction, as does PoincarĂŠ, or the primal intuition of Brouwer, or, finally, as do Russell and Whitehead, axioms of infinity, reducibility, or completeness, which in fact are actual, contentual assumptions that cannot be compensated for by consistency proofs."
"Mathematics knows no races or geographic boundaries; for mathematics, the cultural world is one country."
"One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of earlier publications rendered superfluous by it."
"The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality."
"Wir dĂźrfen nicht denen glauben, die heute mit philosophischer Miene und Ăźberlegenem Tone den Kulturuntergang prophezeien und sich in dem Ignorabimus gefallen. FĂźr uns gibt es kein Ignorabimus, und meiner Meinung nach auch fĂźr die Naturwissenschaft Ăźberhaupt nicht. Statt des tĂśrichten Ignorabimus heiĂe im Gegenteil unsere Losung:"
"More decisive than any other influence for the young Hilbert at KĂśnigsberg was his friendship with Adolf Hurwitz and Minkowski. He got his thorough mathematical training less from lectures, teachers or books, than from conversation."
"Physics is too difficult for physicists!"
"The various branches of geometry are all interrelated closely and quite often unexpectedly. This shows up in many places in the book. Even so... it was necessary to make each chapter...self-contained... We hope that... we have rendered each chapter taken by itself... understandable and interesting. We want to take the reader on a leisurely walk... in the big garden that is geometry, so that each may pick for himself a bouquet to his liking."
"[M]athematics is not a popular subject... The reason for this is to be found in the common superstition that [it] is but a continuation... of the fine art of arithmetic, of juggling with numbers. [We] combat that superstition, by offering, instead of formulas, figures that may be looked at and that may easily be supplemented by models which the reader may construct. This book... bring[s] about a greater enjoyment of mathematics, by making it easier... to penetrate the essence of mathematics without... a laborious course of studies."