“Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Mysteries are feminine; they like to veil themselves but still want to be seen and divined.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Eternal life and the invisible world are only to be sought in God. Only within Him do all spirits dwell. He is an abyss of individuality, the only infinite plenitude.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Nothing is more witty and grotesque than ancient mythology and Christianity; that is because they are so mystical.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“A family can develop only with a loving woman as its center.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Many a witty inspiration is like the surprising reunion of befriended thoughts after a long separation.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“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
“A so-called happy marriage corresponds to love as a correct poem to an improvised song.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Wit as an instrument of revenge is as infamous as art is as a means of sensual titillation.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Ideas are infinite, original, and lively divine thoughts.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Every complete man has his genius. True virtue is genius.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Publication is to thinking as childbirth is to the first kiss.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Religion is absolutely unfathomable. Always and everywhere one can dig more deeply into infinities.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“The genuine priest always feels something higher than compassion.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“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
“Reason is mechanical, wit chemical, and genius organic spirit.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“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
“An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“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
“How many authors are there among writers? Author means originator.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Beauty is that which is simultaneously attractive and sublime.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“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
“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
“The poetry of this one is called philosophical, of that one philological, of a third rhetorical, and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry?”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“There is no self-knowledge but an historical one. No one knows what he himself is who does not know his fellow men, especially the most prominent one of the community, the master’s master, the genius of the age.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Witty inspirations are the proverbs of the educated.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“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
“Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“All the classical genres are now ridiculous in their rigorous purity.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Art and works of art do not make an artist; sense and enthusiasm and instinct do.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Plato’s philosophy is a dignified preface to future religion.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“No idea is isolated, but is only what it is among all ideas.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Think of something finite molded into the infinite, and you think of man.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Like Leibniz’s possible worlds, most men are only equally entitled pretenders to existence. There are few existences.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“The main thing is to know something and to say it.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“What men are among the other formations of the earth, artists are among men.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“About no subject is there less philosophizing than about philosophy.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Considered subjectively, philosophy always begins in the middle, like an epic poem.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“It is as deadly for a mind to have a system as to have none. Therefore it will have to decide to combine both.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“In true prose everything must be underlined.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“As the ancient commander addressed his soldiers before battle, so should the moralist speak to men in the struggle of the era.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Wit is an explosion of the compound spirit.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Virtue is reason which has become energy.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“The historian is a prophet looking backward.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Morality without a sense of paradox is mean.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Since philosophy now criticizes everything it comes across, a critique of philosophy would be nothing less than a just reprisal.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Set religion free, and a new humanity will begin.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“An artist is he for whom the goal and center of life is to form his mind.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Novels tend to end as the Paternoster begins: with the kingdom of God on earth.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“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
“Kant introduced the concept of the negative into philosophy. Would it not also be worthwhile to try to introduce the concept of the positive into philosophy?”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“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
“Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“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
“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
“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
“Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“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
“Religion can emerge in all forms of feeling: here wild anger, there the sweetest pain; here consuming hatred, there the childlike smile of serene humility.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Religion is not only a part of education, an element of humanity, but the center of everything else, always the first and the ultimate, the absolutely original.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“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
“When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“The essential point of view of Christianity is sin.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“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
“God is each truly and exalted thing, therefore the individual himself to the highest degree. But are not nature and the world individuals?”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Man is free whenever he produces or manifests God, and through this he becomes immortal.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“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
“The subject of history is the gradual realization of all that is practically necessary.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.”
― Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
“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
“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
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