Quotes By Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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.

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.

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 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.

The main thing is to know something and to say it.

Think of something finite molded into the infinite, and you think of man.

Morality without a sense of paradox is mean.

Man is free whenever he produces or manifests God, and through this he becomes immortal.

Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.

A family can develop only with a loving woman as its center.

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

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

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.

Since philosophy now criticizes everything it comes across, a critique of philosophy would be nothing less than a just reprisal.

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

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.

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

Reason is mechanical, wit chemical, and genius organic spirit.

Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

Duty is for Kant the One and All. Out of the duty of gratitude, he claims, one has to defend and esteem the ancients; and only out of duty has he become a great man.

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

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

Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.

Wit as an instrument of revenge is as infamous as art is as a means of sensual titillation.

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.

Publication is to thinking as childbirth is to the first kiss.