"We learn from history that we do not learn from history"
"Because of its concrete content, sense-certainty immediately appears as the richest kind of knowledge, indeed a knowledge of infinite wealth for which no bounds can be found, either when we reach out into space and time in which it is dispersed, or when we take a bit of this wealth, and by division enter into it. Moreover, sense-certainty appears to be the truest knowledge ... but, in the event, this very certainty proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth. All that it says about what it knows is just that it is; and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing."
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Source: Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Book by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1821.
Same author
More quotes by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great."
"Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two."
"Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion."
"Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights."
"Everything that from eternity has happened in heaven and earth, the life of God and all the deeds of time simply are the struggles for Spirit to know Itself, to find Itself, be for Itself, and finally unite itself to Itself; it is alienated and divided, but only so as to be able thus to find itself and return to Itself...As existing in an individual form, this liberation is called 'I'; as developed to its totality, it is free Spirit; as feeling, it is Love; and as enjoyment, it is Blessedness."