Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes - Page 5

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

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.

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

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.

Witty inspirations are the proverbs of the educated.

All artists are self-sacrificing human beings, and to become an artist is nothing but to devote oneself to the subterranean gods.

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.

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.

The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages.

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.

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

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

Because Christianity is a religion of death, it could be treated with the utmost realism, and it could have its orgies, just likethe old religion of nature and life.

The naive is what is or appears to be natural, individual, or classical to the point of irony or to the point of continuous alternation of self-creation and self-destruction. If it is only instinct, then it is childlike, childish, or silly; if it is only intention, it becomes affectation.

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

The highest good and solely useful is liberal education.

Separate religion from morality, and you have the true energy for evil within man, the terrible, cruel, devastating, and inhuman principle which naturally lies in his spirit. Here the division of the indivisible punishes itself most awfully.

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

Religion is not only a part of education, an element of humanity, but the center of everything else, always the first and the ultimate, the absolutely original.

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.

The subject of history is the gradual realization of all that is practically necessary.

Virtue is reason which has become energy.

Just as the Romans were the only nation that was truly a nation, so our age is the first genuine age.

A so-called happy marriage corresponds to love as a correct poem to an improvised song.