“The important question of how poverty can be remedied is one which agitates and torments modern societies especially.”

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.

Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion.

If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.

It is comparatively easy to leave a mistress, but very hard to be left by one.

Words are such uncertain things, they so often sound well but mean the opposite of what one thinks they do.

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

The life of a coquette is one constant lie; and the only rule by which you can form any correct judgment of them is that they are never what they seem.

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.

As long as one suffers one lives.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.