110+ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes On Education, Religion And World

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel was a German poet, literary critic, philosopher, and philologist during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He was an early leader of German Romanticism and is known for his influence on the development of the philosophical movement of German Idealism. His works on poetry and aesthetics are still studied today and have had a lasting influence on modern literary criticism. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel on education, religion, life.

Top 10 Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes

1. An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.
2. Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos.
3. Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.
4. Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy.
5. Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.
6. Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.
7. Wit as an instrument of revenge is as infamous as art is as a means of sensual titillation.
8. Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.
9. When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics.
10. 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.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Short Quotes

• Publication is to thinking as childbirth is to the first kiss.
• Man is free whenever he produces or manifests God, and through this he becomes immortal.
• Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.
• Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.
• Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.
• Beauty is that which is simultaneously attractive and sublime.
• Wit is an explosion of the compound spirit.
• What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.
• No idea is isolated, but is only what it is among all ideas.
• Art and works of art do not make an artist; sense and enthusiasm and instinct do.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes About Education

Every good man progressively becomes God. To become God, to be man, and to educate oneself, are expressions that are synonymous. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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. — 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

The highest good and solely useful is liberal education. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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. — 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. Thus one can say: The freer, the more religious; and the more education, the less religion. — 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

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Witty inspirations are the proverbs of the educated. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes About Religion

Religion is absolutely unfathomable. Always and everywhere one can dig more deeply into infinities. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Separate religion from morality, and you have the true energy for evil within man, the terrible, cruel, devastating, and inhuman principle which naturally lies in his spirit. Here the division of the indivisible punishes itself most awfully. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

All thinking of the religious man is etymological, a reduction of all concepts to the original intuition, to the characteristic. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Religion and morals are symmetrically opposed, just like poetry and philosophy. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Poetry and philosophy are, according to how you take them, different spheres, different forms, or factors of religion. Try to really combine both, and you will have nothing but religion. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Only through religion can logic develop into philosophy, only from this source stems that which makes philosophy more than science. And without religion we will have only novels, or the triviality today called belles lettres instead of an eternally rich and infinite poetry. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes About Life

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

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

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Gracefulness is a correct life: sensuality which contemplates and forms itself. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

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. — 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

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes About World

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

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes About Love

A family can develop only with a loving woman as its center. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Original love never appears in pure form, but in manifold veils and shapes, such as confidence, humility, reverence, serenity, asfaithfulness and modesty, as gratefulness; but primarily as longing and wistful melancholy. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

True love should be, according to its origin, entirely arbitrary and entirely accidental at the same time; it should seem both necessary and free; in keeping with its nature, however, it should be both destiny and virtue and appear as a mystery and a miracle. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Those works whose ideal has not as much living reality and, as it were, personality as the beloved one or a friend had better remain unwritten. They would at least never become works of art. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

A so-called happy marriage corresponds to love as a correct poem to an improvised song. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

I can no longer say my love and your love; they are both alike in their perfect mutuality. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes About Philosophical

Philosophy is the true home of irony, which might be defined as logical beauty: for wherever men are philosophizing in spoken or written dialogues, and provided they are not entirely systematic, irony ought to be produced and postulated; even the Stoics regarded urbanity as a virtue. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

When the author has no idea of what to reply to a critic, he then likes to say: you could not do it better anyway. This is the same as if a dogmatic philosopher reproached a skeptic for not being able to devise a system. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Every philosophical review ought to be a philosophy of reviews at the same time. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Philosophy still moves too much straight ahead, and is not yet cyclical enough. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

With respect to ingenious subconsciousness, I think, philosophers might well rival poets. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

The whole history of modern poetry is a continuous commentary on the short text of philosophy: every art should become science, and every science should become art; poetry and philosophy should be united. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

About no subject is there less philosophizing than about philosophy. — 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

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? — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes About Ancients

Nothing is more witty and grotesque than ancient mythology and Christianity; that is because they are so mystical. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

In the ancients, one sees the accomplished letter of entire poetry: in the moderns, one has the presentiment of the spirit in becoming. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes About Philosophy

One of two things is usually lacking in the so-called Philosophy of Art: either philosophy or art. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

Considered subjectively, philosophy always begins in the middle, like an epic poem. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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? — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

The few existing writings against Kantian philosophy are the most important documents in the case history of sound common sense. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

The life and vigor of poetry consists of the fact that it steps out of itself, tears out a section of religion, then withdraws into itself to assimilate it. The same is true of philosophy. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

You wanted to destroy philosophy and poetry in order to make room for religion and morality which you misunderstood: but you wereable to destroy only yourself. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes About Divine

Mysteries are feminine; they like to veil themselves but still want to be seen and divined. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Wit is the appearance, the external flash, of fantasy. Hence its divinity and the similarity to the wit of mysticism. — 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

Laziness is the one divine fragment of a godlike existence left to man from paradise. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Ideas are infinite, original, and lively divine thoughts. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

A classification is a definition comprising a system of definitions. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

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? — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Many a witty inspiration is like the surprising reunion of befriended thoughts after a long separation. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Reason is mechanical, wit chemical, and genius organic spirit. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Novels tend to end as the Paternoster begins: with the kingdom of God on earth. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

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

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

All the classical genres are now ridiculous in their rigorous purity. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

The subject of history is the gradual realization of all that is practically necessary. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

The essential point of view of Christianity is sin. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Sense (for a particular art, science, human being, and so forth) is divided spirit; self-restraint is consequently the result of self-creation and self-destruction. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

One of the two is almost always a prevailing tendency of every author: either not to say some things which certainly should be said, or to say many things which did not need to be said. The first is the original sin of synthetic natures, the latter of analytical natures. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

In true prose everything must be underlined. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

Poetry should describe itself, and always be simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

The naive which is simultaneously beautiful, poetic, and idealistic, must be both intention and instinct. The essence of intention, in this sense, is freedom. Consciousness is far from intention. There is a certain enamoured contemplation of one's own naturalness or silliness which itself is unspeakably silly. Intention does not necessarily require a profound calculation or plan. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

The two basic maxims of the so-called historical criticism are the postulate of the common and the axiom of the ordinary. Postulate of the common: everything really great, good, and beautiful, is improbable, since it is extraordinary and therefore at least suspect. Axiom of the ordinary: our conditions and environment must have existed everywhere, for they are really so natural. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

The historian is a prophet looking backward. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Morality without a sense of paradox is mean. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Virtue is reason which has become energy. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

One should have wit, but not wish to have it; otherwise there will be witticism, the Alexandrian style of wit. — 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

It is as deadly for a mind to have a system as to have none. Therefore it will have to decide to combine both. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Is it not superfluous to write more than one novel if the writer has not become, say, a new man? Obviously, all the novels of an author not infrequently belong together and are to a certain degree only one novel. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Plato's philosophy is a dignified preface to future religion. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Since poetry is infinitely valuable, I do not understand why it should be more valuable than this or that which is also infinitelyvaluable. There are artists who perhaps do not think art to be too great, for this is impossible, and yet they are not free enough to be able to rise above their own best accomplishments. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Life Lessons by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

1. Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel taught that life is a journey of self-discovery, and that we should strive to understand ourselves and our place in the world.
2. He believed that life should be lived with passion and creativity, and that we should always be open to new ideas and experiences.
3. He also encouraged us to embrace our differences and to appreciate the beauty and diversity of the world around us.