d. 1829 · 88 quotes
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
d. 1829
Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy.
All the classical genres are now ridiculous in their rigorous purity.
Virtue is reason which has become energy.
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.
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?
The genuine priest always feels something higher than compassion.
The essential point of view of Christianity is sin.
Publication is to thinking as childbirth is to the first kiss.
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.
Morality without a sense of paradox is mean.
Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.
Religion must completely encircle the spirit of ethical man like his element, and this luminous chaos of divine thoughts and feelings is called enthusiasm.
Witty inspirations are the proverbs of the educated.
Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.
Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.
The main thing is to know something and to say it.
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.
It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.
The historian is a prophet looking backward.
In true prose everything must be underlined.
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.
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.
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.
