Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes

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

Laziness is the one divine fragment of a godlike existence left to man from paradise.

Every good man progressively becomes God. To become God, to be man, and to educate oneself, are expressions that are synonymous.

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.

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

All the classical genres are now ridiculous in their rigorous purity.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

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

Religion is not only a part of education, an element of humanity, but the center of everything else, always the first and the ultimate, the absolutely original.

The essential point of view of Christianity is sin.

Considered subjectively, philosophy always begins in the middle, like an epic poem.

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

Novels tend to end as the Paternoster begins: with the kingdom of God on earth.

Good drama must be drastic.

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.

There are writers in Germany who drink the Absolute like water; and there are books in which even the dogs make references to the Infinite.

How many authors are there among writers? Author means originator.

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

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.

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

He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.

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

A so-called happy marriage corresponds to love as a correct poem to an improvised song.

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?

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.

The historian is a prophet looking backward.

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

Honor is the mysticism of legality

All the great truths are basically trivial and so we have to find new ways, preferably paradoxical ways, of expressing them, in order to keep them from falling into oblivion.

Ideas are infinite, original, and lively divine thoughts.

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.

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

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

When ideas become gods, consciousness of harmony becomes devotion, humility, and hope.

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

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.

If you want to penetrate into the heart of physics, then let yourself be initiated into the mysteries of poetry.

Sense (for a particular art, science, human being, and so forth) is divided spirit; self-restraint is consequently the result of self-creation and self-destruction.

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.

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

I can no longer say my love and your love; they are both alike in their perfect mutuality.

Witty inspirations are the proverbs of the educated.

With respect to ingenious subconsciousness, I think, philosophers might well rival poets.

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.

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

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

Just as a child is really a thing that wants to become a man, so is the poem an object of nature that wants to become an object ofart.

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.

Kant introduced the concept of the negative into philosophy. Would it not also be worthwhile to try to introduce the concept of the positive into philosophy?

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