Quotes By Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Ideas are infinite, original, and lively divine thoughts.

The difference between religion and morality lies simply in the classical division of things into the divine and the human, if one only interprets this correctly.

About no subject is there less philosophizing than about philosophy.

Witty inspirations are the proverbs of the educated.

The historian is a prophet looking backward.

An artist is he for whom the goal and center of life is to form his mind.

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 essential point of view of Christianity is sin.

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.

Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.

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

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.

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

Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.

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

Like Leibniz's possible worlds, most men are only equally entitled pretenders to existence. There are few existences.

Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality.

The genuine priest always feels something higher than compassion.

Eternal life and the invisible world are only to be sought in God. Only within Him do all spirits dwell. He is an abyss of individuality, the only infinite plenitude.

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

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

All men are somewhat ridiculous and grotesque, just because they are men; and in this respect artists might well be regarded as man multiplied by two. So it is, was, and shall be.

Beauty is that which is simultaneously attractive and sublime.

Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.

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

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?

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.

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