Friedrich Schelling Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

If there is to be any philosophy at all, this contradiction must be resolved – and the solution of this problem, or answer to the question: how can we think both of Presentations as conforming to objects, and objects as conforming to presentations? is, not the first, but the highest task of transcendental philosophy.

Friedrich Schelling
How both the objective world accommodates to presentations in us, and presentations in us to the objective world, is unintelligible unless between the two worlds, the ideal and the real, there exists a pre-determined harmony. But this latter is itself unthinkable unless the activity, whereby the objective world, is produced, is at bottom identical with that which expresses itself in volition, and vice versa.

Friedrich Schelling
Architecture in general is frozen music.

Friedrich Schelling
All rules for study are summed up in this one: learn only in order to create.

Friedrich Schelling
It is easy to see that this problem can be solved neither in theoretical nor in practical philosophy, but only in a higher discipline, which is the link that combines them, and neither theoretical nor practical, but both at once.

Friedrich Schelling
The fear of speculation, the ostensible rush from the theoretical to the practical, brings about the same shallowness in action that it does in knowledge. It is by studying a strictly theoretical philosophy that we become most acquainted with Ideas, and only Ideas provide action with energy and ethical significance.

Friedrich Schelling
Nature is not an inert mass; and to him who can comprehend her vast sublimity, she reveals herself as the creative force of the universe - before all time, eternal, ever active, she calls to life all things, whether perishable or imperishable.

Friedrich Schelling
You are engrossed in botany? in optic? What are you doing? Is it not much nicer to move a tender heart? Ah well, those tender hearts! A bungler can easily move them; Let my only happiness be to stay in touch with you, Oh Nature!

Friedrich Schelling
Nature! We are surrounded by her and locked in her clasp: powerless to leave her, and powerless to come closer to her. Unasked and unwarned she takes us up into the whirl of her dance, and hurries on with us till we are weary and fall from her arms.

Friedrich Schelling
Has creation a final purpose at all, and if so why is it not attained immediately, why does perfection not exist from the very beginning?

Friedrich Schelling
Nature knows no trifling; she is always sincere, always serious, always stern; she is always in the right, and the errors and mistakes are invariably ours.

Friedrich Schelling
We live in the midst of her [Nature] and are strangers. She speaks to us unceasingly and betrays not her secret. We are always influencing her and yet can do her no violence.

Friedrich Schelling
The knowledge of nature is a good thing; but it must be studied primarily in its natural and healthy connection with ourselves. I would not force young people to court a curious intimacy with worms, and beetles, and monkeys, and other creatures removed from the natural range of human sympathy.

Friedrich Schelling
There is here little that is universal and subjective, for the isolated manifestations of the laws of nature lie without us - all sphynx-like, motionless, firm, and dumb.

Friedrich Schelling
Chemistry itself is a science which advances securely upon the beaten path of experience, even when it does not turn back to first principles. But a science which in itself is so rich, and which has lately made such great progress towards system, surely deserves to be led back to such principles.

Friedrich Schelling