Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes - Page 3

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.

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

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.

Honor is the mysticism of legality

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

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

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

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

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

It is a thoughtless and immodest presumption to learn anything about art from philosophy. Some do begin as if they hoped to learnsomething new here, since philosophy cannot and should not do anything further than develop the given art experiences and the existing art concepts into a science, improve the views of art, and promote them with the help of a thoroughly scholarly art history, and produce that logical mood about these subjects too which unites absolute liberalism with absolute rigor.

A good preface must be the root and the square of the book at the same time.

The genuine priest always feels something higher than compassion.

A classification is a definition comprising a system of definitions.

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.

We do not see God, but everywhere we see something divine; first and most typically in the center of a reasonable man, in the depth of a living human product. You can directly feel and think nature, the universe, but not the Godhead. Only the man among men can poetize and think divinely and live with religion.

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

Gracefulness is a correct life: sensuality which contemplates and forms itself.

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

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

The following are the universally fundamental laws of literary communication: 1. one must have something to communicate; 2. one must have someone to whom to communicate it; 3. one must really communicate it, not merely express it for oneself alone. Otherwise it would be more to the point to remain silent.

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.

Some speak of the public as if it were someone with whom they have had dinner at the Leipzig Fair in the Hotel de Saxe. Who is this public? The public is not a thing, but rather an idea, a postulate, like the Church.

In order to be able to write well upon a subject, one must have ceased to be interested in it; the thought which is to be soberlyexpressed must already be entirely past and no longer be one's actual concern.

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

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.