Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes

Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

I like the cerebral process.

An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis.

Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed by generalization from his appearances in the past.

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense.

The final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition, and of this thought no longer forms a part; but belief is only a stadium of mental action, an effect upon our nature due to thought, which will influence future thinking.

Thought means life, since those who do not think so do not live in any high or real sense. Thinking makes the man.

All action results from thought, so it is thoughts that matter.

To minds of a certain cast there is nothing so captivating as simplification and generalization.

A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.

Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise.

Thought and speech are inseparable from each other. Matter and expression are parts of one; style is a thinking out into language.

Thinking is movement confined to the brain

One does one's thinking before one knows what one is to think about.

To the young mind every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote things cohere and flower out from one stem.

Thinking. A process by which I use my brain to make a rational decision.

Concepts are mental images.

Compared with men, it is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters, nor have associations by similarity. Their thoughts probably pass from one concrete object to its habitual concrete successor far more uniformly than is the case with us. In other words, their associations of ideas are almost exclusively by contiguity. So far, however, as any brute might think by abstract characters instead of by association of con cretes, he would have to be admitted to be a reasoner in the true human sense. How far this may take place is quite uncertain.

I don't think in any language. I think in images.

Keep thinking. You can hear our brains rattling around inside us, like the littler Russian dolls.

The thought process can never be complete without articulation.

Another characteristic of mathematical thought is that it can have no success where it cannot generalize.

I don't think there is any scientific evidence about the question of whether we think only in language or not. But introspection indicates pretty clearly that we don't think in language necessarily. We also think in visual images, we think in terms of situations and events, and so on, and many times we can't even express in words what the content of our thinking is. And even if we are able to express it in words, it is a common experience to say something and then to recognize that it is not what we meant, that it is something else.

If you remember only one thing I've said, remember that an idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor. If you have never made a good metaphor, then you don't know what it's all about.