Schiller is an important philosopher because he shows just how integral the idea of beauty is in normal life.

The struggle against subjectivism was the attempt to avoid the charge of what was then called "idealism" or "nihilism", i.e., that we know nothing more than our own representations.

There is no comfortable middle path where we get to provide a rational justification for our basic moral, religious and common sense beliefs.

Hegel remains of great importance to understand ourselves, but essentially because we have all grown out of a reaction against Hegel.

All the spookiness comes from giving a contemporary anachronistic sense to terms whose historical meaning is lost to us.

The idea of romanticising the world goes back to the idea of creating a harmonious whole where the individual will feel at one with himself, others and nature.

To live well is to live in harmony with ourselves, others and nature, and that idea of harmony is, of course, an aesthetic one.

The absolute as the idea is neither subjective nor objective; it is the intellectual structure under which they are subsumed.

The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and so they struggled by all conceptual means to avoid it.

You only have to talk to artists to see that they work according to rules, and that they know all too well that they can employ only certain means to achieve the ends they want.

That Hegel is a metaphysician, and that he thinks metaphysics is fundamental to philosophy, is plain enough from his definition of philosophy.

Literacy is a fundamental life skill, one that serves as a portal to knowledge and a lifetime of opportunity.

He knocks on doors and stands there. You’d be surprised how few doors get answered

Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.

It was all love on my side, and all good comradeship and friendship on hers. When we parted she was a free woman, but I could never again be a free man.

Truth and beauty can still win battles. We need more art, more passion, more wit in defense of the Earth.

When I die, the world dies with me. I'd really like to leave it better than how I found it and I'm doing what I can to effect that.

I'm a bit of a connoisseur of Google criticism.

Emotions are wild horses. It is not explanations that carry us forward, but our will to go on.

Each of us has a "soft spot": the place in our experience where we feel vulnerable and tender. This soft spot is inherent in appreciation and love, and it is equally inherent in pain.

Christianity has not failed. It is simply that nations have failed to try it. There would be no war in a God-directed world.