Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel - Spirit Quotes

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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
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
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
Moderation is the spirit of castrated narrow-mindedness.

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