Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes
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Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form.
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Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.
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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.
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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.
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Religion is absolutely unfathomable. Always and everywhere one can dig more deeply into infinities.
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When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics.
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Every complete man has his genius. True virtue is genius.
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In true prose everything must be underlined.
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Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy.
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God is each truly and exalted thing, therefore the individual himself to the highest degree. But are not nature and the world individuals?
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Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.
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Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.
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He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.
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Wit as an instrument of revenge is as infamous as art is as a means of sensual titillation.
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Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.
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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?
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An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.
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Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.
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There are people with whom everything they consider a means turns mysteriously into an end.
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Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality.
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Art and works of art do not make an artist; sense and enthusiasm and instinct do.
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Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.
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A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.
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He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion.