“Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form.”
Wisdom
“Beauty is that which is simultaneously attractive and sublime.”
BeautyAll Quotes by 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.”
Poetry“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.”
Respect“Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.”
Science“Religion is absolutely unfathomable. Always and everywhere one can dig more deeply into infinities.”
Religion“Beauty is that which is simultaneously attractive and sublime.”
Beauty“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.”
Age“He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion.”
Poetry“Wit as an instrument of revenge is as infamous as art is as a means of sensual titillation.”
Art“A family can develop only with a loving woman as its center.”
Family“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?”
Poetry“Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet especially not against their poetry.”
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.”
Religion“Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.”
Poetry“He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.”
Nature“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.”
Anger“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.”
Art“The subject of history is the gradual realization of all that is practically necessary.”
History“Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.”
Imagination“Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.”
Art