Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel quotes:

Religion can emerge in all forms of feeling: here wild anger, there the sweetest pain; here consuming hatred, there the childlike smile of serene humility.

In the world of language, or in other words in the world of art and liberal education, religion necessarily appears as mythology or as Bible.

Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form.

Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.

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

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.

The German national character is a favorite subject of character experts, probably because the less mature a nation, the more she is an object of criticism and not of history.

A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.

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

What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures.

Form your life humanly, and you have done enough: but you will never reach the height of art and the depth of science without something divine.

A family can develop only with a loving woman as its center.

Eternal life and the invisible world are only to be sought in God. Only within Him do all spirits dwell. He is an abyss of individuality, the only infinite plenitude.

There is no self-knowledge but an historical one. No one knows what he himself is who does not know his fellow men, especially the most prominent one of the community, the master's master, the genius of the age.

Novels tend to end as the Paternoster begins: with the kingdom of God on earth.

If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.

Plato's philosophy is a dignified preface to future religion.

The subject of history is the gradual realization of all that is practically necessary.

Religion is not only a part of education, an element of humanity, but the center of everything else, always the first and the ultimate, the absolutely original.

Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.

Duty is for Kant the One and All. Out of the duty of gratitude, he claims, one has to defend and esteem the ancients; and only out of duty has he become a great man.

Set religion free, and a new humanity will begin.

There are writers in Germany who drink the Absolute like water; and there are books in which even the dogs make references to the Infinite.

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

Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.

Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.

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

God is each truly and exalted thing, therefore the individual himself to the highest degree. But are not nature and the world individuals?

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

Religion is absolutely unfathomable. Always and everywhere one can dig more deeply into infinities.

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

The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages.

Ideas are infinite, original, and lively divine thoughts.

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

Publication is to thinking as childbirth is to the first kiss.

Art and works of art do not make an artist; sense and enthusiasm and instinct do.

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.

Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos.

A priest is he who lives solely in the realm of the invisible, for whom all that is visible has only the truth of an allegory.

Most thoughts are only profiles of thoughts. They must be inverted and synthesized with their antipodes. Thus many philosophical writings become very interesting which would not have been so otherwise.

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

Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy.

That which reminds us of nature and thus stimulates a feeling for the infinite abundance of life is beautiful. Nature is organic,and therefore the highest beauty is forever vegetative; and the same is true for morality and love.

Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.

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.

Without poetry, religion becomes obscure, false, and malignant; without philosophy, licentious in all wantonness, and lascivious to the point of self-castration.

Wit is an explosion of the compound spirit.

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

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

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

When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics.

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

Considered subjectively, philosophy always begins in the middle, like an epic poem.

Think of something finite molded into the infinite, and you think of man.

Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.

Good drama must be drastic.

The meanest authors have at least this similarity with the great author of heaven and earth, that they usually say after a completed day of work: "And behold, what he had done was good.

The symmetry and organization of history teaches us that mankind, during its existence and development, genuinely was and became an individual, a person. In this great personality of mankind, God became man.

Nothing is more witty and grotesque than ancient mythology and Christianity; that is because they are so mystical.

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.

There are ancient and modern poems which breathe, in their entirety and in every detail, the divine breath of irony. In such poemsthere lives a real transcendental buffoonery. Their interior is permeated by the mood which surveys everything and rises infinitely above everything limited, even above the poet's own art, virtue, and genius; and their exterior form by the histrionic style of an ordinary good Italian buffo.

Wit as an instrument of revenge is as infamous as art is as a means of sensual titillation.

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

Some speak of the public as if it were someone with whom they have had dinner at the Leipzig Fair in the Hotel de Saxe. Who is this public? The public is not a thing, but rather an idea, a postulate, like the Church.

Whoever could properly characterize Goethe's Meister would have actually expressed what is the timely trend in literature. He would be able, as far as literary criticism is concerned, to rest.

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

The obsession with moderation is the spirit of castrated narrow-mindedness.

Because Christianity is a religion of death, it could be treated with the utmost realism, and it could have its orgies, just likethe old religion of nature and life.

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

Laziness is the one divine fragment of a godlike existence left to man from paradise.

Like Leibniz's possible worlds, most men are only equally entitled pretenders to existence. There are few existences.

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.

Many a witty inspiration is like the surprising reunion of befriended thoughts after a long separation.

All artists are self-sacrificing human beings, and to become an artist is nothing but to devote oneself to the subterranean gods.

Imagination must first be filled to the point of saturation with life of every kind before the moment arrives when the friction of free sociability electrifies it to such an extent that the most gentle stimulus of friendly or hostile contact elicits from it lightning sparks, luminous flashes, or shattering blows.

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?

Witty inspirations are the proverbs of the educated.

The French Revolution, Fichte's Theory of Knowledge, and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister are the three greatest tendencies of the age. Whoever takes offence at this combination, and whoever does not consider a revolution important unless it is blatant and palpable, has not yet risen to the lofty and broad vantage point of the history of mankind.

How many authors are there among writers? Author means originator.

Kant introduced the concept of the negative into philosophy. Would it not also be worthwhile to try to introduce the concept of the positive into philosophy?

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

Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.

What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.

Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality.

The historian is a prophet looking backward.

Every complete man has his genius. True virtue is genius.

A classification is a definition comprising a system of definitions.

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.

About no subject is there less philosophizing than about philosophy.

All the classical genres are now ridiculous in their rigorous purity.

All the great truths are basically trivial and so we have to find new ways, preferably paradoxical ways, of expressing them, in order to keep them from falling into oblivion.

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

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

An artist is he who has his center within himself. He who lacks this must choose a particular leader and mediator outside of himself, not forever, however, but only at first. For man cannot exist without a living center, and if he does not have it within himself, he may seek it only in a human being. Only a human being and his center can stimulate and awaken that of another.

As long as the artist invents and is inspired, he remains in a constrained state of mind, at least for the purpose of communication. He then wants to say everything, which is the wrong tendency of young geniuses or the right prejudice of old bunglers. Thus, he fails to recognize the value and dignity of self-restraint, which is indeed for both the artist and the man the first and the last, the most necessary and the highest goal.

Beauty is that which is simultaneously attractive and sublime.

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.

Can we expect the redemption of the world from scholars? I doubt it. But the time has come for all artists to join together as a confederation in an eternal league.

Even a friendly conversation which cannot be at any given moment be broken off voluntarily with complete arbitrariness has something illiberal about it. An artist, however, who is able and wants to express himself completely, who keeps nothing to himself and would wish to say everything he knows, is very much to be pitied.

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.

Every good man progressively becomes God. To become God, to be man, and to educate oneself, are expressions that are synonymous.

Every philosophical review ought to be a philosophy of reviews at the same time.

Every relationship of man to the infinite is religion, namely of a man in the full abundance of his humanity. Whenever a mathematician calculates infinity, that, to be sure, is not religion. Infinity conceived in this abundance is the Godhead.

Genius is, to be sure, not a matter of arbitrariness, but rather of freedom, just as wit, love, and faith, which once shall become arts and disciplines. We should demand genius from everybody, without, however, expecting it.

German writings attain popularity through a great name, or through personalities, or through good connections, or through effort,or through moderate immorality, or through accomplished incomprehensibility, or through harmonious platitude, or through versatile boredom, or through constant striving after the absolute.

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?

Gracefulness is a correct life: sensuality which contemplates and forms itself.

He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.

Honor is the mysticism of legality

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

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.

If one believes philosophers, then what we call religion is only a deliberately popularized or an instinctively artless philosophy. Poets seem to consider religion rather as a variation of poetry which by misjudging its proper beautiful game takes itself too seriously and one-sidedly. Philosophy, however, admits and recognizes that it can begin and complete itself only with religion. Poetry seeks only to strive for the infinite and despises worldly utility and culture, which are the true antitheses of religion. Eternal peace among artists is thus not far away.

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.

If the essence of cynicism consists in preferring nature to art, virtue to beauty and science; in not bothering about the letter of things -- to which the Stoic strictly adheres -- but in looking up to the spirit of things; in absolute contempt of all economic values and political splendor, and in courageous defence of the rights of independent freedom; then Christianity would be nothing but universal cynicism.

If the mystical lovers of the arts, who consider all criticism dissection and all dissection destruction of enjoyment, thought logically, an exclamation like "Goodness alive!" would be the best criticism of the most deserving work of art. There are critiques which say nothing but that, only they do so more extensively.

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

In England, wit is at least a profession, if not an art. everything becomes professional there, and even the rogues of that islandare pedants. So are the "wits" there too. They introduce into reality absolute freedom whose reflection lends a romantic and piquant air to wit, and thus they live wittily; hence their talent for madness. They die for their principles.

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

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.

In order to be able to write well upon a subject, one must have ceased to be interested in it; the thought which is to be soberlyexpressed must already be entirely past and no longer be one's actual concern.