Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes

We should never invoke the spirit of antiquity as our authority. Spirits are peculiar things; they cannot be grasped with the hands and be held up before others. Spirits reveal themselves only to spirits. The most direct and concise method would be, in this case as well, to prove the possession of the only redeeming faith by good works.

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

Genius is, to be sure, not a matter of arbitrariness, but rather of freedom, just as wit, love, and faith, which once shall become arts and disciplines. We should demand genius from everybody, without, however, expecting it.

Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.

A family can develop only with a loving woman as its center.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Wit as an instrument of revenge is as infamous as art is as a means of sensual titillation.

Can we expect the redemption of the world from scholars? I doubt it. But the time has come for all artists to join together as a confederation in an eternal league.

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

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.

The main thing is to know something and to say it.

Only through religion can logic develop into philosophy, only from this source stems that which makes philosophy more than science. And without religion we will have only novels, or the triviality today called belles lettres instead of an eternally rich and infinite poetry.

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.

Good drama must be drastic.

In England, wit is at least a profession, if not an art. everything becomes professional there, and even the rogues of that islandare pedants. So are the "wits" there too. They introduce into reality absolute freedom whose reflection lends a romantic and piquant air to wit, and thus they live wittily; hence their talent for madness. They die for their principles.

Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.

Life is writing. The sole purpose of mankind is to engrave the thoughts of divinity onto the tablets of nature.

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

The naive which is simultaneously beautiful, poetic, and idealistic, must be both intention and instinct. The essence of intention, in this sense, is freedom. Consciousness is far from intention. There is a certain enamoured contemplation of one's own naturalness or silliness which itself is unspeakably silly. Intention does not necessarily require a profound calculation or plan.

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

A genuinely free and educated man should be able to tune himself, as one tunes a musical instrument, absolutely arbitrarily, at his convenience at any time and to any degree, philosophically or philologically, critically or poetically, historically or rhetorically, in ancient or modern form.

In true prose everything must be underlined.

Is it not superfluous to write more than one novel if the writer has not become, say, a new man? Obviously, all the novels of an author not infrequently belong together and are to a certain degree only one novel.

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

If the mystical lovers of the arts, who consider all criticism dissection and all dissection destruction of enjoyment, thought logically, an exclamation like "Goodness alive!" would be the best criticism of the most deserving work of art. There are critiques which say nothing but that, only they do so more extensively.

There are three kinds of explanation in science: explanations which throw a light upon, or give a hint at a matter; explanations which do not explain anything; and explanations which obscure everything.

Publication is to thinking as childbirth is to the first kiss.

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.

A good preface must be the root and the square of the book at the same time.

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

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

Reason is mechanical, wit chemical, and genius organic spirit.

You wanted to destroy philosophy and poetry in order to make room for religion and morality which you misunderstood: but you wereable to destroy only yourself.

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

Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.

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.

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.

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

Philosophy is the true home of irony, which might be defined as logical beauty: for wherever men are philosophizing in spoken or written dialogues, and provided they are not entirely systematic, irony ought to be produced and postulated; even the Stoics regarded urbanity as a virtue.

Where philosophy ends, poetry must commence. There should not be a common point of view, a natural manner of thinking which standsin contrast to art and liberal education, or mere living; that is, one should not conceive of a realm of crudeness beyond the boundaries of education. Every conscious link of an organism should not perceive its limits without a feeling for its unity in relation to the whole. For example, philosophy should not only be contrasted to non-philosophy, but also to poetry.

The history of imitation of the older literature, particularly abroad, has among other advantages this one, that the important concepts of unintentional parody and passive wit can be deduced from it most easily and comprehensively.

Most thoughts are only profiles of thoughts. They must be inverted and synthesized with their antipodes. Thus many philosophical writings become very interesting which would not have been so otherwise.

Witty inspirations are the proverbs of the educated.

Think of something finite molded into the infinite, and you think of man.

Original love never appears in pure form, but in manifold veils and shapes, such as confidence, humility, reverence, serenity, asfaithfulness and modesty, as gratefulness; but primarily as longing and wistful melancholy.

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

To disrespect the masses is moral; to honor them, lawful.

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

The poetry of this one is called philosophical, of that one philological, of a third rhetorical, and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry?

The essential point of view of Christianity is sin.

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

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

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.

Nothing is more witty and grotesque than ancient mythology and Christianity; that is because they are so mystical.

The whole history of modern poetry is a continuous commentary on the short text of philosophy: every art should become science, and every science should become art; poetry and philosophy should be united.

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

The most important thing in love is the sense for one another, and the highest thing the faith in one another. Devotion is the expression of that faith, and pleasure can revive and enhance that sense, even if not create it, as is commonly thought. Therefore, sensuality can delude bad persons for a short time into thinking they could love each other.

Poetry can be criticized only through poetry. A critique which itself is not a work of art, either in content as representation ofthe necessary impression in the process of creation, or through its beautiful form and in its liberal tone in the spirit of the old Roman satire, has no right of citizenship in the realm of art.

Wit is absolutely sociable spirit or aphoristic genius.

There are ancient and modern poems which breathe, in their entirety and in every detail, the divine breath of irony. In such poemsthere lives a real transcendental buffoonery. Their interior is permeated by the mood which surveys everything and rises infinitely above everything limited, even above the poet's own art, virtue, and genius; and their exterior form by the histrionic style of an ordinary good Italian buffo.

Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.

When the author has no idea of what to reply to a critic, he then likes to say: you could not do it better anyway. This is the same as if a dogmatic philosopher reproached a skeptic for not being able to devise a system.

The genuine priest always feels something higher than compassion.

True love should be, according to its origin, entirely arbitrary and entirely accidental at the same time; it should seem both necessary and free; in keeping with its nature, however, it should be both destiny and virtue and appear as a mystery and a miracle.

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

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.

It is a thoughtless and immodest presumption to learn anything about art from philosophy. Some do begin as if they hoped to learnsomething new here, since philosophy cannot and should not do anything further than develop the given art experiences and the existing art concepts into a science, improve the views of art, and promote them with the help of a thoroughly scholarly art history, and produce that logical mood about these subjects too which unites absolute liberalism with absolute rigor.

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

In order to be able to write well upon a subject, one must have ceased to be interested in it; the thought which is to be soberlyexpressed must already be entirely past and no longer be one's actual concern.

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.

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

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

A classification is a definition comprising a system of definitions.

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

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

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

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

Virtue is reason which has become energy.

Both in their origins and effects, boredom and stuffy air resemble each other. They are usually generated whenever a large number of people gather together in a closed room.

Wit is an explosion of the compound spirit.

Ideas are infinite, original, and lively divine thoughts.

Duty is for Kant the One and All. Out of the duty of gratitude, he claims, one has to defend and esteem the ancients; and only out of duty has he become a great man.

It is individuality which is the original and eternal within man; personality doesn't matter so much. To pursue the education anddevelopment of this individuality as one's highest vocation would be a divine egoism.

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

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.

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

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.

Honor is the mysticism of legality

Some speak of the public as if it were someone with whom they have had dinner at the Leipzig Fair in the Hotel de Saxe. Who is this public? The public is not a thing, but rather an idea, a postulate, like the Church.

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

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

A classical work doesn't ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it.

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

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.

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