Quotes By Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The genuine priest always feels something higher than compassion.

All men are somewhat ridiculous and grotesque, just because they are men; and in this respect artists might well be regarded as man multiplied by two. So it is, was, and shall be.

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

Beauty is that which is simultaneously attractive and sublime.

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

He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

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

Considered subjectively, philosophy always begins in the middle, like an epic poem.

Many a witty inspiration is like the surprising reunion of befriended thoughts after a long separation.

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

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.

Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.

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

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

Virtue is reason which has become energy.

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.

In true prose everything must be underlined.

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.