Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
55 quotes
Biography
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel was a German literary critic, philosopher, and Indologist. With his older brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel, he was one of the main figures of Jena Romanticism.
"Wit is an explosion of the compound spirit."
"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."
"Religion can emerge in all forms of feeling: here wild anger, there the sweetest pain here consuming hatred, there the childlike smile of serene humility."
"Art and works of art do not make an artist sense and enthusiasm and instinct do."
"Wit as an instrument of revenge is as infamous as art is as a means of sensual titillation."
"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."
"Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry."
"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."
"Beauty is that which is simultaneously attractive and sublime."
"Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher."
"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."
"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."
"A family can develop only with a loving woman as its center."
"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."
"Plato's philosophy is a dignified preface to future religion."
"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."
"The subject of history is the gradual realization of all that is practically necessary."
"A so-called happy marriage corresponds to love as a correct poem to an improvised song."
"Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry."
"Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself."
"He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her."
"God is each truly and exalted thing, therefore the individual himself to the highest degree. But are not nature and the world individuals?"
"Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry."
"A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named."
"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?"