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

Education in its early stages always begins with fault-finding, but when it is complete, it sees the positive element in everything.

Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.

The very fact that something is determined as a limitation implies that the limitation is already transcended.

No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is not a hero, but because the valet is a valet.

We learn from history that we do not learn from history.

Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.

History in general is therefore the development of Spirit in Time, as Nature is the development of the Idea is Space.

Uneducated people delight in argument and fault-finding, for it is easy to find fault, but difficult to recognize the good and its inner necessity.

The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary.

Lacking strength beauty hates the understanding for asking of her what it cannot do.

The valor that struggles is better than the weakness that endures.

The most obvious symptoms of an epoch-making system are the misunderstandings and the awkward conduct of its adversaries.

War is progress, peace is stagnation.

Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.

What is reasonable is real; that which is real is reasonable.

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

Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.

Animals are my friends and I don’t eat my friends.

No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.

Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human.

If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

I choose not to make a graveyard of my body for the rotting corpses of dead animals.

Man is the religious animal.