Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes

Honor is the mysticism of legality

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

With respect to ingenious subconsciousness, I think, philosophers might well rival poets.

I can no longer say my love and your love; they are both alike in their perfect mutuality.

Every relationship of man to the infinite is religion, namely of a man in the full abundance of his humanity. Whenever a mathematician calculates infinity, that, to be sure, is not religion. Infinity conceived in this abundance is the Godhead.

Sense (for a particular art, science, human being, and so forth) is divided spirit; self-restraint is consequently the result of self-creation and self-destruction.

Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy.

The obsession with moderation is the spirit of castrated narrow-mindedness.

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?

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

One mentions many artists who are actually art works of nature.

Whoever has not arrived at the clear insight that there might be greatness entirely outside his own sphere for which he has no understanding, whoever does not have at least a dim inkling in which area of the human spirit this greatness might be situated: he is within his own sphere either without genius, or he has not educated himself up to the point of the classical attitude.

Set religion free, and a new humanity will begin.

In true prose everything must be underlined.

Religion is usually nothing but a supplement to or even a substitute for education, and nothing is religious in the strict sense which is not a product of freedom. Thus one can say: The freer, the more religious; and the more education, the less religion.

You wanted to destroy philosophy and poetry in order to make room for religion and morality which you misunderstood: but you wereable to destroy only yourself.

If one writes or reads novels from the point of view of psychology, it is very inconsistent and petty to want to shy away from even the slowest and most detailed analysis of the most unnatural lusts, gruesome tortures, shocking infamy, and disgusting sensual or spiritual impotence.

One should have wit, but not wish to have it; otherwise there will be witticism, the Alexandrian style of wit.

Ideas are infinite, original, and lively divine thoughts.

True love should be, according to its origin, entirely arbitrary and entirely accidental at the same time; it should seem both necessary and free; in keeping with its nature, however, it should be both destiny and virtue and appear as a mystery and a miracle.

Without poetry, religion becomes obscure, false, and malignant; without philosophy, licentious in all wantonness, and lascivious to the point of self-castration.

Original love never appears in pure form, but in manifold veils and shapes, such as confidence, humility, reverence, serenity, asfaithfulness and modesty, as gratefulness; but primarily as longing and wistful melancholy.

Through artists mankind becomes an individual, in that they unite the past and the future in the present. They are the higher organ of the soul, where the life spirits of entire external mankind meet and in which inner mankind first acts.

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

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

The historian is a prophet looking backward.

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

Philosophy still moves too much straight ahead, and is not yet cyclical enough.

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

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

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

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

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

The analytical writer observes the reader as he is; accordingly, he makes his calculation, sets his machine to make the appropriate effect on him. The synthetic writer constructs and creates his own reader; he does not imagine him as resting and dead, but lively and advancing toward him. He makes that which he had invented gradually take shape before the reader's eyes, or he tempts him to do the inventing for himself. He does not want to make a particular effect on him, but rather enters into a solemn relationship of innermost symphilosophy or sympoetry.

Just as a child is really a thing that wants to become a man, so is the poem an object of nature that wants to become an object ofart.

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

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

That which reminds us of nature and thus stimulates a feeling for the infinite abundance of life is beautiful. Nature is organic,and therefore the highest beauty is forever vegetative; and the same is true for morality and love.

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

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.

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

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 except historical self-knowledge. No one knows what he is if he doesn't know what his contemporaries are.

Morality without a sense of paradox is mean.

There is so much poetry, and yet nothing is more rare than a poetic work. This is what the masses make out of poetical sketches, studies, aphorisms, trends, ruins, and raw material.

In every good poem everything must be both deliberate and instinctive. That is how the poem becomes ideal.

Nothing is more piquant than when a man of genius possesses mannerisms; not so when they possess him -- this leads to spiritual petrification.

Wit is absolutely sociable spirit or aphoristic genius.