Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes

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

About no subject is there less philosophizing than about philosophy.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Religion and morals are symmetrically opposed, just like poetry and philosophy.

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.

Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.

Ideas are infinite, original, and lively divine thoughts.

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

The historian is a prophet looking backward.

Prudishness is pretense of innocence without innocence. Women have to remain prudish as long as men are sentimental, dense, and evil enough to demand of them eternal innocence and lack of education. For innocence is the only thing which can ennoble lack of education.

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

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

The meanest authors have at least this similarity with the great author of heaven and earth, that they usually say after a completed day of work: "And behold, what he had done was good.

Beauty is that which is simultaneously attractive and sublime.

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

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

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

As long as the artist invents and is inspired, he remains in a constrained state of mind, at least for the purpose of communication. He then wants to say everything, which is the wrong tendency of young geniuses or the right prejudice of old bunglers. Thus, he fails to recognize the value and dignity of self-restraint, which is indeed for both the artist and the man the first and the last, the most necessary and the highest goal.