Top 150 Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “It is individuality which is the original and eternal within man; personality doesn’t matter so much. To pursue the education anddevelopment of this individuality as one’s highest vocation would be a divine egoism.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

103. “There is no self-knowledge except historical self-knowledge. No one knows what he is if he doesn’t know what his contemporaries are.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

104. “Plato’s philosophy is a dignified preface to future religion.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

106. “The life of the artist should be distinguished from that of all other people, even in external habits. They are Brahmins, a highercaste, not ennobled by birth, however, but by deliberate self-initiation.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

107. “Religion must completely encircle the spirit of ethical man like his element, and this luminous chaos of divine thoughts and feelings is called enthusiasm.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

108. “The main thing is to know something and to say it.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

111. “Every form of life is in its origin not natural, but divine and human; for it must spring from love, just as there can be no reason without spirit.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

113. “A genuinely free and educated man should be able to tune himself, as one tunes a musical instrument, absolutely arbitrarily, at his convenience at any time and to any degree, philosophically or philologically, critically or poetically, historically or rhetorically, in ancient or modern form.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

114. “No idea is isolated, but is only what it is among all ideas.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

115. “One mentions many artists who are actually art works of nature.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

117. “In true prose everything must be underlined.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

118. “When the author has no idea of what to reply to a critic, he then likes to say: you could not do it better anyway. This is the same as if a dogmatic philosopher reproached a skeptic for not being able to devise a system.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

119. “Religion is usually nothing but a supplement to or even a substitute for education, and nothing is religious in the strict sense which is not a product of freedom. Thus one can say: The freer, the more religious; and the more education, the less religion.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

120. “Is it not superfluous to write more than one novel if the writer has not become, say, a new man? Obviously, all the novels of an author not infrequently belong together and are to a certain degree only one novel.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

122. “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.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

123. “If one writes or reads novels from the point of view of psychology, it is very inconsistent and petty to want to shy away from even the slowest and most detailed analysis of the most unnatural lusts, gruesome tortures, shocking infamy, and disgusting sensual or spiritual impotence.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

124. “Religion and morals are symmetrically opposed, just like poetry and philosophy.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

125. “The life and vigor of poetry consists of the fact that it steps out of itself, tears out a section of religion, then withdraws into itself to assimilate it. The same is true of philosophy.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

126. “All thinking of the religious man is etymological, a reduction of all concepts to the original intuition, to the characteristic.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

127. “Those works whose ideal has not as much living reality and, as it were, personality as the beloved one or a friend had better remain unwritten. They would at least never become works of art.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

128. “As the ancient commander addressed his soldiers before battle, so should the moralist speak to men in the struggle of the era.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

132. “I have expressed some ideas that point to the center; I have saluted the dawn in my way, from my point of view. He who knows the way should do the same, in his way, and from his point of view.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

133. “Virtue is reason which has become energy.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

134. “In many a poetic work, one gets here and there, instead of representation merely a title indicating that this or that was supposedto be represented here, that the artist has been prevented from doing it and most humbly asks to be kindly excused.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

135. “One should have wit, but not wish to have it; otherwise there will be witticism, the Alexandrian style of wit.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

136. “Wit is absolutely sociable spirit or aphoristic genius.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

138. “The genuine priest always feels something higher than compassion.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

139. “In every good poem everything must be both deliberate and instinctive. That is how the poem becomes ideal.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

141. “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?”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

142. “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.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

143. “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.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

144. “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.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

145. “God the father, and even more often the devil himself, appears at times in the place of fate in the modern tragedy. Why is it thatthis has not induced any scholar to develop a theory of the diabolical genre?”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

146. “Through artists mankind becomes an individual, in that they unite the past and the future in the present. They are the higher organ of the soul, where the life spirits of entire external mankind meet and in which inner mankind first acts.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

147. “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.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

148. “Just as the Romans were the only nation that was truly a nation, so our age is the first genuine age.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

149. “The history of imitation of the older literature, particularly abroad, has among other advantages this one, that the important concepts of unintentional parody and passive wit can be deduced from it most easily and comprehensively.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

150. “The essential point of view of Christianity is sin.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel