Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotations

Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.

Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.

When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics.

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.

Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.

Many a witty inspiration is like the surprising reunion of befriended thoughts after a long separation.

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

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.

Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos.

A family can develop only with a loving woman as its center.

He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.

Wit as an instrument of revenge is as infamous as art is as a means of sensual titillation.

Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.

Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.

Ideas are infinite, original, and lively divine thoughts.

An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.

Think of something finite molded into the infinite, and you think of man.

One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.

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.

Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.

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.

Every complete man has his genius. True virtue is genius.

Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.

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?

Mysteries are feminine; they like to veil themselves but still want to be seen and divined.

Nothing is more witty and grotesque than ancient mythology and Christianity; that is because they are so mystical.

An artist is he for whom the goal and center of life is to form his mind

As the ancient commander addressed his soldiers before battle, so should the moralist speak to men in the struggle of the era.

Man is free whenever he produces or manifests God, and through this he becomes immortal.

Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

Publication is to thinking as childbirth is to the first kiss.

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?

Wit is an explosion of the compound spirit.

Considered subjectively, philosophy always begins in the middle, like an epic poem.

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.

It is as deadly for a mind to have a system as to have none. Therefore it will have to decide to combine both.

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.

How many authors are there among writers? Author means originator.

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.

Like Leibniz's possible worlds, most men are only equally entitled pretenders to existence. There are few existences.

Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form.

What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures.

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.

Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.

The main thing is to know something and to say it.

Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality.

Every good man progressively becomes God. To become God, to be man, and to educate oneself, are expressions that are synonymous.

Morality without a sense of paradox is mean.

He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion.

Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.

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.

Witty inspirations are the proverbs of the educated.

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.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

Plato's philosophy is a dignified preface to future religion.

Set religion free, and a new humanity will begin.

Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.

The subject of history is the gradual realization of all that is practically necessary.

Novels tend to end as the Paternoster begins: with the kingdom of God on earth.

Religion is absolutely unfathomable. Always and everywhere one can dig more deeply into infinities.

The essential point of view of Christianity is sin.

The genuine priest always feels something higher than compassion.

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.

What men are among the other formations of the earth, artists are among men.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Art and works of art do not make an artist; sense and enthusiasm and instinct do.

A so-called happy marriage corresponds to love as a correct poem to an improvised song.

Beauty is that which is simultaneously attractive and sublime.

Reason is mechanical, wit chemical, and genius organic spirit.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

Since philosophy now criticizes everything it comes across, a critique of philosophy would be nothing less than a just reprisal.

What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.

No idea is isolated, but is only what it is among all ideas.

About no subject is there less philosophizing than about philosophy.

All the classical genres are now ridiculous in their rigorous purity.

Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy.

From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.

God is each truly and exalted thing, therefore the individual himself to the highest degree. But are not nature and the world individuals?

Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.

Religion must completely encircle the spirit of ethical man like his element, and this luminous chaos of divine thoughts and feelings is called enthusiasm.

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.

If the essence of cynicism consists in preferring nature to art, virtue to beauty and science; in not bothering about the letter of things -- to which the Stoic strictly adheres -- but in looking up to the spirit of things; in absolute contempt of all economic values and political splendor, and in courageous defence of the rights of independent freedom; then Christianity would be nothing but universal cynicism.

Only he who possesses a personal religion, an original view of infinity, can be an artist.

What do the few existing mystics still do? -- They more or less mold the raw chaos of already existing religion. But only in an isolated, insignificant manner, through feeble attempts. Do it in a grand manner from all aspects with unified efforts, and let us awaken all religions from their graves, newly revivify and form the immortal ones through the omnipotence of art and science.

To disrespect the masses is moral; to honor them, lawful.

Poetry should describe itself, and always be simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry.

Laziness is the one divine fragment of a godlike existence left to man from paradise.

All artists are self-sacrificing human beings, and to become an artist is nothing but to devote oneself to the subterranean gods.

One of two things is usually lacking in the so-called Philosophy of Art: either philosophy or art.

When ideas become gods, consciousness of harmony becomes devotion, humility, and hope.

If you want to penetrate into the heart of physics, then let yourself be initiated into the mysteries of poetry.

Life is writing. The sole purpose of mankind is to engrave the thoughts of divinity onto the tablets of nature.

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.

Poetry can be criticized only through poetry. A critique which itself is not a work of art, either in content as representation ofthe necessary impression in the process of creation, or through its beautiful form and in its liberal tone in the spirit of the old Roman satire, has no right of citizenship in the realm of art.

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.

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.