Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes

Nothing is more piquant than when a man of genius possesses mannerisms; not so when they possess him -- this leads to spiritual petrification.

In the ancients, one sees the accomplished letter of entire poetry: in the moderns, one has the presentiment of the spirit in becoming.

One should have wit, but not wish to have it; otherwise there will be witticism, the Alexandrian style of wit.

Virtue is reason which has become energy.

There is so much poetry, and yet nothing is more rare than a poetic work. This is what the masses make out of poetical sketches, studies, aphorisms, trends, ruins, and raw material.

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

In true prose everything must be underlined.

Without poetry, religion becomes obscure, false, and malignant; without philosophy, licentious in all wantonness, and lascivious to the point of self-castration.

The life and vigor of poetry consists of the fact that it steps out of itself, tears out a section of religion, then withdraws into itself to assimilate it. The same is true of philosophy.

One mentions many artists who are actually art works of nature.

The few existing writings against Kantian philosophy are the most important documents in the case history of sound common sense.

Those works whose ideal has not as much living reality and, as it were, personality as the beloved one or a friend had better remain unwritten. They would at least never become works of art.

The need to raise itself above humanity is humanity's main characteristic.

The meanest authors have at least this similarity with the great author of heaven and earth, that they usually say after a completed day of work: "And behold, what he had done was good.

Religion and morals are symmetrically opposed, just like poetry and philosophy.

I have expressed some ideas that point to the center; I have saluted the dawn in my way, from my point of view. He who knows the way should do the same, in his way, and from his point of view.

All thinking of the religious man is etymological, a reduction of all concepts to the original intuition, to the characteristic.

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

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.

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

Wit is absolutely sociable spirit or aphoristic genius.

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.

Every form of life is in its origin not natural, but divine and human; for it must spring from love, just as there can be no reason without spirit.

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

Whoever could properly characterize Goethe's Meister would have actually expressed what is the timely trend in literature. He would be able, as far as literary criticism is concerned, to rest.

Philosophy still moves too much straight ahead, and is not yet cyclical enough.

Poetry and philosophy are, according to how you take them, different spheres, different forms, or factors of religion. Try to really combine both, and you will have nothing but religion.

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

Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.

Every philosophical review ought to be a philosophy of reviews at the same time.

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