“Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me.”

The one who merely flees is not yet free. In fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees.

It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value.

Every consciousness pursues the death of the other.

America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself.

What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

Art does not simply reveal God: it is one of the ways in which God reveals, and thus actualizes, himself.

Too fair to worship, too divine to love.

World history is a court of judgment.

It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained.

The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the coming of the dusk.

Devotion – a state of mind in which it refuses to occupy itself any longer with the limited and particular.

Thinking is, indeed, essentially the negation of that which is before us.

Art is the sensuous presentation of ideas.

History is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history.

History teaches us that man learns nothing from history.

Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

We can look for beauty in the mirror, but the mirror only reflects one aspect of who we are.

Death has but one terror, that it has no tomorrow.

We’re all looking for something, but all it really is, is love in some way or another.

Behind every face there is so much more.

It’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.

The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.

Everyone wants to be good but good is only what we’re taught to perceive.