August Wilhelm von Schlegel Quotations

The thinker requires exactly the same light as the painter, clear, without direct sunshine, or blinding reflection, and, where possible, from above.

Formerly it was the fashion to preach the natural; now it is the ideal. People too often forget that these things are profoundly compatible; that in a beautiful work of imagination the natural should be ideal, and the ideal natural.

Authorship is, according to the spirit in which it is pursued, an infamy, a pastime, a day-labor, a handicraft, an art, a science, a virtue.

What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting.

That which exists in nature is a something purely individual and particular. Art, on the contrary, is essentially destined to manifest the general.

Our mind has its own ideal time, which is no other but the consciousness of the progressive development of our beings.

Literature is the immortality of speech.

In actual life, every great enterprise begins with and takes its first forward step in faith.