Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes about Literature

About no subject is there less philosophizing than about philosophy.

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

Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.

The historian is a prophet looking backward.

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

Beauty is that which is simultaneously attractive and sublime.

Religion is absolutely unfathomable. Always and everywhere one can dig more deeply into infinities.

Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.

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

Mysteries are feminine; they like to veil themselves but still want to be seen and divined.

God is each truly and exalted thing, therefore the individual himself to the highest degree. But are not nature and the world individuals?

Every complete man has his genius. True virtue is genius.

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.

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

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.

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

Wit is an explosion of the compound spirit.

Set religion free, and a new humanity will begin.

How many authors are there among writers? Author means originator.

Since philosophy now criticizes everything it comes across, a critique of philosophy would be nothing less than a just reprisal.

What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures.

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

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.

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.