Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

40 quotes

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel is a German poet, critic, philosopher, and Indologist whose words have traveled far beyond their original audience. Their thinking spans from Poetry to Religion, revealing a mind that refused to stay in one lane. Explore 54 quotes by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel on subjects including Poetry, Religion, Art, Nature, and Education — each one a window into a distinctive way of seeing the world. Perhaps their most recognizable line: "He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her."

“One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Poetry

All Quotes by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Family

“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

Anger

“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

Truth

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Poetry

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Poetry

“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

Poetry

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Poetry

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Marriage

“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

History

“Set religion free, and a new humanity will begin.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Religion

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Education

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Art

“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

Education

“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

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.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Religion

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Religion

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

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Science

“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.”

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Poetry

“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

“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

Poetry