Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes

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There are three kinds of explanation in science: explanations which throw a light upon, or give a hint at a matter; explanations which do not explain anything; and explanations which obscure everything.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
If you want to penetrate into the heart of physics, then let yourself be initiated into the mysteries of poetry.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
In a perfect literature all books should be only a single book, and in such an eternally developing book, the gospel of humanity and culture will be revealed.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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
Think of something finite molded into the infinite, and you think of man.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Prudishness is pretense of innocence without innocence. Women have to remain prudish as long as men are sentimental, dense, and evil enough to demand of them eternal innocence and lack of education. For innocence is the only thing which can ennoble lack of education.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Only by being cultivated does a human being … become altogether human and permeated by humanity.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
An artist is he for whom the goal and center of life is to form his mind.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Poetry can be criticized only through poetry. A critique which itself is not a work of art, either in content as representation of the necessary impression in the process of creation, or through its beautiful form and in its liberal tone in the spirit of the old Roman satire, has no right of citizenship in the realm of art.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
To live classically and to realize antiquity practically within oneself is the summit and goal of philology.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
The romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Only a man who is at one with the world can be at one with himself.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Thou shalt not make unto thee any ideal, neither of an angel in heaven, nor of a hero in a poem or novel, nor one that is dreamed up or imagined: rather shalt thou love a man as he is.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
What am I proud of, and what can I be proud of as an artist? Of the decision that separated and isolated me forever from everything ordinary.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
The historian is a reversed prophet.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
The Satan of the Italian and English poets may be poetic; but the German Satan is satanic; and thus one could say that Satan is a German invention.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Life is writing. The sole purpose of mankind is to engrave the thoughts of divinity onto the tablets of nature.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
The mind understands something only insofar as it absorbs it like a seed into itself, nurtures it, and lets it grow into blossom and fruit. Therefore scatter holy seeds into the soil of the spirit.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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
To give the community of artists a particular purpose would mean … debasing the community of saints into a state.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
To disrespect the masses is moral; to honor them, lawful.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
As a transitional condition, skepticism is logical insurrection; as a system, it is anarchy. Skeptical method would therefore be much the same as rule by insurgents.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
It is equally fatal for the spirit to have a system and to have none. One must thus decide to join the two.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Only he who possesses a personal religion, an original view of infinity, can be an artist.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
The life of the artist should be distinguished from that of all other people, even in external habits. They are Brahmins, a higher caste, not ennobled by birth, however, but through deliberate self-initiation.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
There are people with whom everything they consider a means turns mysteriously into an end.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
At the words "his philosophy, my philosophy," one is always reminded of that line in Nathan: … "What kind of God is it who belongs to a man?"

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel