A Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

Quote Topics

Accomplished Becoming Entire Letter Poetry Sees Spirit

Quote Author

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
German - Poet
March 10, 1772 - January 12, 1829

The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

The ancients tell us what is best; but we must learn of the moderns what is fittest.

Benjamin Franklin

Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns.

William Penn

We [the Moderns] are like dwarves perched on the shoulders of giants [the Ancients], and thus we are able to see more and farther than the latter.

Bernard of Chartres

Someone has said that to plagiarise from the ancients is to play the pirate beyond the Equator, but that to steal from the moderns is to pick pockets at street corners.

Nicolas Chamfort

A jurist can obey the letter of the law and violate its spirit, or it can follow the spirit of the law and violate the letter of the law. I want someone who can reconcile the letter and the spirit of the law without partisan leanings.

Ron Crumpton

Speak of the moderns without contempt and of the ancients without idolatry; judge them all by their merits, but not by their age

Lord Chesterfield

Poetry is a presentiment of the truth.

Anna Kamienska

The ancients, by their system of colonization, made themselves friends all over the known world; the moderns have sought to make subjects, and therefore have made enemies.

Jean-Baptiste Say

If the ancients left us ideas, to our credit be it spoken that we moderns are building houses for them -- structures which neither Plato nor Archimedes had dreamed possible.

Amos Bronson Alcott

The finest and most beautiful ideas on morals and manners have been swept away before our times, and nothing is left for us but to glean after the ancients and the ablest amongst the moderns.

Jean de la Bruyere

If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.

Charles Caleb Colton

To the haranguers of the populace among the ancients, succeed among the moderns your writers of political pamphlets and news-papers, and your coffee-house talkers.

Benjamin Franklin

The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.