Top 100 Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes
#2. Both in their origins and effects, boredom and stuffy air resemble each other. They are usually generated whenever a large number of people gather together in a closed room.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#3. Without poetry, religion becomes obscure, false, and malignant; without philosophy, licentious in all wantonness, and lascivious to the point of self-castration.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#4. Religion must completely encircle the spirit of ethical man like his element, and this luminous chaos of divine thoughts and feelings is called enthusiasm.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#5. All thinking of the religious man is etymological, a reduction of all concepts to the original intuition, to the characteristic.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#6. All artists are self-sacrificing human beings, and to become an artist is nothing but to devote oneself to the subterranean gods.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#12. The history of imitation of the older literature, particularly abroad, has among other advantages this one, that the important concepts of unintentional parody and passive wit can be deduced from it most easily and comprehensively.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#13. There is no self-knowledge except historical self-knowledge. No one knows what he is if he doesn't know what his contemporaries are.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#15. There are writers in Germany who drink the Absolute like water; and there are books in which even the dogs make references to the Infinite.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#21. One of the two is almost always a prevailing tendency of every author: either not to say some things which certainly should be said, or to say many things which did not need to be said. The first is the original sin of synthetic natures, the latter of analytical natures.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#22. If one writes or reads novels from the point of view of psychology, it is very inconsistent and petty to want to shy away from even the slowest and most detailed analysis of the most unnatural lusts, gruesome tortures, shocking infamy, and disgusting sensual or spiritual impotence.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#23. Because Christianity is a religion of death, it could be treated with the utmost realism, and it could have its orgies, just likethe old religion of nature and life.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#26. True love should be, according to its origin, entirely arbitrary and entirely accidental at the same time; it should seem both necessary and free; in keeping with its nature, however, it should be both destiny and virtue and appear as a mystery and a miracle.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#27. In the world of language, or in other words in the world of art and liberal education, religion necessarily appears as mythology or as Bible.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#28. Every form of life is in its origin not natural, but divine and human; for it must spring from love, just as there can be no reason without spirit.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#29. If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#33. Form your life humanly, and you have done enough: but you will never reach the height of art and the depth of science without something divine.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#36. In the ancients, one sees the accomplished letter of entire poetry: in the moderns, one has the presentiment of the spirit in becoming.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#37. Every good man progressively becomes God. To become God, to be man, and to educate oneself, are expressions that are synonymous.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#38. Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#40. The difference between religion and morality lies simply in the classical division of things into the divine and the human, if one only interprets this correctly.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#42. The life of the artist should be distinguished from that of all other people, even in external habits. They are Brahmins, a highercaste, not ennobled by birth, however, but by deliberate self-initiation.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#43. Some speak of the public as if it were someone with whom they have had dinner at the Leipzig Fair in the Hotel de Saxe. Who is this public? The public is not a thing, but rather an idea, a postulate, like the Church.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#44. The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#45. All men are somewhat ridiculous and grotesque, just because they are men; and in this respect artists might well be regarded as man multiplied by two. So it is, was, and shall be.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#48. The German national character is a favorite subject of character experts, probably because the less mature a nation, the more she is an object of criticism and not of history.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#50. Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#51. Separate religion from morality, and you have the true energy for evil within man, the terrible, cruel, devastating, and inhuman principle which naturally lies in his spirit. Here the division of the indivisible punishes itself most awfully.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#53. Duty is for Kant the One and All. Out of the duty of gratitude, he claims, one has to defend and esteem the ancients; and only out of duty has he become a great man.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#54. Religion is usually nothing but a supplement to or even a substitute for education, and nothing is religious in the strict sense which is not a product of freedom. Thus one can say: The freer, the more religious; and the more education, the less religion.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#63. The whole history of modern poetry is a continuous commentary on the short text of philosophy: every art should become science, and every science should become art; poetry and philosophy should be united.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#64. The naive is what is or appears to be natural, individual, or classical to the point of irony or to the point of continuous alternation of self-creation and self-destruction. If it is only instinct, then it is childlike, childish, or silly; if it is only intention, it becomes affectation.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#69. The symmetry and organization of history teaches us that mankind, during its existence and development, genuinely was and became an individual, a person. In this great personality of mankind, God became man.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#72. You wanted to destroy philosophy and poetry in order to make room for religion and morality which you misunderstood: but you wereable to destroy only yourself.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#73. Genius is, to be sure, not a matter of arbitrariness, but rather of freedom, just as wit, love, and faith, which once shall become arts and disciplines. We should demand genius from everybody, without, however, expecting it.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#74. Only through religion can logic develop into philosophy, only from this source stems that which makes philosophy more than science. And without religion we will have only novels, or the triviality today called belles lettres instead of an eternally rich and infinite poetry.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#75. Poetry and philosophy are, according to how you take them, different spheres, different forms, or factors of religion. Try to really combine both, and you will have nothing but religion.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#76. Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#78. Most thoughts are only profiles of thoughts. They must be inverted and synthesized with their antipodes. Thus many philosophical writings become very interesting which would not have been so otherwise.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#79. A classical work doesn't ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#82. There is so much poetry, and yet nothing is more rare than a poetic work. This is what the masses make out of poetical sketches, studies, aphorisms, trends, ruins, and raw material.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#83. Through artists mankind becomes an individual, in that they unite the past and the future in the present. They are the higher organ of the soul, where the life spirits of entire external mankind meet and in which inner mankind first acts.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#84. Is it not superfluous to write more than one novel if the writer has not become, say, a new man? Obviously, all the novels of an author not infrequently belong together and are to a certain degree only one novel.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#85. It is individuality which is the original and eternal within man; personality doesn't matter so much. To pursue the education anddevelopment of this individuality as one's highest vocation would be a divine egoism.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#86. A priest is he who lives solely in the realm of the invisible, for whom all that is visible has only the truth of an allegory.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#87. Can we expect the redemption of the world from scholars? I doubt it. But the time has come for all artists to join together as a confederation in an eternal league.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#88. Original love never appears in pure form, but in manifold veils and shapes, such as confidence, humility, reverence, serenity, asfaithfulness and modesty, as gratefulness; but primarily as longing and wistful melancholy.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#92. Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#94. All the great truths are basically trivial and so we have to find new ways, preferably paradoxical ways, of expressing them, in order to keep them from falling into oblivion.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#95. A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#97. God the father, and even more often the devil himself, appears at times in the place of fate in the modern tragedy. Why is it thatthis has not induced any scholar to develop a theory of the diabolical genre?
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#100. In many a poetic work, one gets here and there, instead of representation merely a title indicating that this or that was supposedto be represented here, that the artist has been prevented from doing it and most humbly asks to be kindly excused.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
