Top 189 Quotes & Sayings by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a German poet Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
Karl Wilhelm FriedrichSchlegel was a German poet, literary critic, philosopher, philologist, and Indologist. With his older brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel, he was one of the main figures of Jena Romanticism.
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.
Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.
Many a witty inspiration is like the surprising reunion of befriended thoughts after a long separation.
Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.
Beauty is that which is simultaneously attractive and sublime.
One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.
Wit is an explosion of the compound spirit.
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.
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.
Virtue is reason which has become energy.
Wit as an instrument of revenge is as infamous as art is as a means of sensual titillation.
Plato's philosophy is a dignified preface to future religion.
Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.
Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.
Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.
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.
He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion.
Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.
Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy.
It is as deadly for a mind to have a system as to have none. Therefore it will have to decide to combine both.
One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.
The historian is a prophet looking backward.
Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.
Mysteries are feminine; they like to veil themselves but still want to be seen and divined.
A family can develop only with a loving woman as its center.
No idea is isolated, but is only what it is among all ideas.
Art and works of art do not make an artist; sense and enthusiasm and instinct do.
An artist is he for whom the goal and center of life is to form his mind.
All the classical genres are now ridiculous in their rigorous purity.
The main thing is to know something and to say it.
Witty inspirations are the proverbs of the educated.
An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.
Religion must completely encircle the spirit of ethical man like his element, and this luminous chaos of divine thoughts and feelings is called enthusiasm.
Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.
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.
Ideas are infinite, original, and lively divine thoughts.
Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form.
The genuine priest always feels something higher than compassion.
Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.
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.
Nothing is more witty and grotesque than ancient mythology and Christianity; that is because they are so mystical.
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?
Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality.
Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos.
Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.
How many authors are there among writers? Author means originator.
Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.
Man is free whenever he produces or manifests God, and through this he becomes immortal.
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.
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.
Every complete man has his genius. True virtue is genius.
A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.
When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics.
What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures.
A so-called happy marriage corresponds to love as a correct poem to an improvised song.
He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.
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.
Reason is mechanical, wit chemical, and genius organic spirit.
As the ancient commander addressed his soldiers before battle, so should the moralist speak to men in the struggle of the era.