Quotes By Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics.

Wit is an explosion of the compound spirit.

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

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

As the ancient commander addressed his soldiers before battle, so should the moralist speak to men in the struggle of the era.

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

What men are among the other formations of the earth, artists are among men.

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.

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

Ideas are infinite, original, and lively divine thoughts.

The difference between religion and morality lies simply in the classical division of things into the divine and the human, if one only interprets this correctly.

About no subject is there less philosophizing than about philosophy.

Witty inspirations are the proverbs of the educated.

The historian is a prophet looking backward.

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

If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.

The essential point of view of Christianity is sin.

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.

Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.

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

There are writers in Germany who drink the Absolute like water; and there are books in which even the dogs make references to the Infinite.

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

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

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

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

Like Leibniz's possible worlds, most men are only equally entitled pretenders to existence. There are few existences.

The genuine priest always feels something higher than compassion.

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.

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