August Wilhelm von Schlegel Quotes

Germany, Poet
September 8, 1767 – May, 12, 1845.

August Wilhelm (after 1812: von) Schlegel, usually cited as August Schlegel, was a German poet, translator and critic, and with his brother Friedrich Schlegel the leading influence within Jena Romanticism. His translations of Shakespeare turned the English dramatist's works into German classics. Schlegel was also the first professor of Sanskrit in Continental Europe and produced a translation of the Bhagavad Gita.

Also known as Translator, Critic

Our mind has its own ideal time, which is no other but the consciousness of the progressive development of our beings.

August Wilhelm von Schlegel
What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting.

August Wilhelm von Schlegel

Formerly it was the fashion to preach the natural; now it is the ideal. People too often forget that these things are profoundly compatible; that in a beautiful work of imagination the natural should be ideal, and the ideal natural.

August Wilhelm von Schlegel
That which exists in nature is a something purely individual and particular. Art, on the contrary, is essentially destined to manifest the general.

August Wilhelm von Schlegel
- Art
- Nature
- Individual
Authorship is, according to the spirit in which it is pursued, an infamy, a pastime, a day-labor, a handicraft, an art, a science, a virtue.

August Wilhelm von Schlegel
- Virtue
- Authorship
- Infamy
Egotism erects its center in itself; love places it out of itself in the axis of the universal whole. Love aims at unity, egotismat solitude. Love is the citizen ruler of a flourishing republic, egotism is a despot in a devastated creation.

August Wilhelm von Schlegel
- Love
- Solitude
- Unity
In actual life, every great enterprise begins with and takes its first forward step in faith.

August Wilhelm von Schlegel
- Faith
- Step
- Enterprise
The thinker requires exactly the same light as the painter, clear, without direct sunshine, or blinding reflection, and, where possible, from above.

August Wilhelm von Schlegel

Literature is the immortality of speech.

August Wilhelm von Schlegel