Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes

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An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Irony is a form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
It is individuality which is the original and eternal within man; personality doesn't matter so much. To pursue the education and development of this individuality as one's highest vocation would be a divine egoism.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
You live only insofar as you live according to your own ideas.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Expect nothing more from philosophy than a voice, language and grammar of the instinct for Godliness that lies at its origin, and, essentially, is philosophy itself.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Like the Roman senators, true artists are a nation of kings.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Novels are the Socratic dialogs of our time. This free form has become the refuge of common sense in its flight from pedantry.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
The Kantians' conception of duty relates to the commandment of honor, the voice of God and one's calling in us, as the dried plant to the fresh flower on the living stem.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Whatever can be done while poetry and philosophy are separated has been done and accomplished. So the time has come to unite the two.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
If there is an invisible church, then it is of the great paradox, which is inseparable from morality, and which must be distinguished from the merely philosophical. People who are so eccentric that they are completely serious in being and becoming virtuous understand one another in everything, find one another easily, and form a silent opposition against the prevailing immorality that pretends to be morality. A certain mysticism of expression, which joined with romantic fantasy and grammatical understanding, can be something charming and good, often serves as a symbol of their beautiful secrets.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
The need to raise itself above humanity is humanity's prime characteristic.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Take playfulness seriously, and you will apprehend what is at the center and rediscover you revered art in a more sublime light.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
In the same way as philosophy loses sight of its true object and appropriate matter, when either it passes into and merges in theology, or meddles with external politics, so also does it mar its proper form when it attempts to mimic the rigorous method of mathematics.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Romantic poetry … recognizes as its first commandment that the will of the poet can tolerate no law above itself.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
People who are eccentric enough to be quite seriously virtuous understand each other everywhere, discover each other easily, and form a silent opposition to the ruling immorality that happens to pass for morality.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
The artist should have as little desire to rule as to serve. He can only create, do nothing but create, and so help the state only by … exalting politicians and economists into artists.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
An artist is someone who carries his center within himself. Whoever lacks such a center has to choose some particular leader and mediator outside of himself.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
In England … everything becomes professional … even the rogues of that island are pedants.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Moderation is the spirit of castrated narrow-mindedness.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
You wanted to destroy philosophy and poetry in order to make room for religion and morality.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
A mediator is one who perceives the divinity within himself and who self-destructively sacrifices himself in order to reveal, communicate, and represent to all mankind this divinity in his conduct and actions, in his words and works.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Do not waste your faith and love on the political world, but, in the divine world of science and art, offer up your inmost being in a fiery stream of eternal creation.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Whoever hasn't yet arrived at the clear realization that there might be a greatness existing entirely outside his own sphere and for which he might have absolutely no feeling; whoever hasn't at least felt obscure intimations concerning the approximate location of this greatness in the geography of the human spirit: that person either has no genius in his own sphere, or else he hasn't been educated to the level of the classic.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
It is in fact wonderful how physics — as soon as it is concerned not with technical purposes but with general results — without knowing it gets into cosmogony, astrology, theosophy, or whatever you wish to call it, in short, into a mystic discipline of the whole.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel