Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes
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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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About no subject is there less philosophizing than about philosophy.
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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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Religion is absolutely unfathomable. Always and everywhere one can dig more deeply into infinities.
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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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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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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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Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.
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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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Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.
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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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Wit as an instrument of revenge is as infamous as art is as a means of sensual titillation.
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He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.
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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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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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Art and works of art do not make an artist; sense and enthusiasm and instinct do.
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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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He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion.
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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.
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Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality.
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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.