The aesthetic dimension of the ideal state comes out in the idea of harmony, which is the classical idea of beauty as "concinnitas" or "unity-in-variety".

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.

Phones are distracting. The internet is distracting.The way he looked at you? He wasn't distracted. He was consumed.

Dragonflies are reminders that we are light and we can reflect light in powerful ways if we choose to do so.

The farther we get from God, the more the world spirals out of control.

The first game was against Wake Forrest - I'll never forget that game.

In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy.

Boldness, more boldness, and perpetual boldness!.

I grew up in the United Methodist Church, and church was always a very big part of my growing up.

I can't lie, I did a lot of really, really stupid things, and it was because it was my way of crying for help.

Everything - even mountains, rivers, plants and trees - should be your teacher.

In particular in how [Barack Obama] has directed what you could describe as patronizing remarks to African-American communities.