12 Quotes by August Wilhelm Schlegel

Our mind has its own ideal time, which is no other but the consciousness of the progressive development of our beings.

For the expression of passion, the glances of the eye, the motion of the arms and hands, the attitudes, and, lastly, the tones of the voice, remained there. We complain of the loss of the play of the features, without reflecting, that at such a great distance, its effect would have been altogether lost.

The poetic spirit requires to be limited, that it may move with a becoming liberty, within its proper precincts, as has been felt by all nations on the first invention of metre; it must act according to laws derivable from its own essence, otherwise its strength will evaporate in boundless vacuity.

Euripides, however, has drawn Fate down from the region of the infinite; and with him inevitable necessity not unfrequently degenerates into the caprice of chance. Accordingly, he can no longer apply it to its proper purpose, namely, by contrast with it, to heighten the moral liberty of man. How few of his pieces turn upon a steadfast resistance to the decrees of fate, or an equally heroic submission to them! His characters generally suffer because they must, and not because they will.

Those critics who consider the authority of the ancients as models to be such, that in poetry, as in all the other arts, there can be no safety out of the pale of imitation, affirm, that as the nations in question have not followed this course, they have brought nothing but irregular works on the stage, which, though they may possess occasional passages of splendour and beauty, must yet, as a whole, be for ever reprobated as barbarous, and wanting in form.

Reason and understanding are represented as the voluntary slaves of the senses.

But the mighty course of human destinies proceeds: like the change of season, with measured pace: great designs ripen slowly; stealthily and hesitantly the dark suggestions of deadly malice quit the abysses of mind for the light of day. and, as Horace, with equal truth and beauty observes, "the flying criminal is only followed limpingly by penal retribution.

As the poets for the most part had their share of scholarship, it gave rise to a curious struggle between their natural inclination and their imaginary duty. When they sacrificed to the latter, they were praised by the learned; but by yielding to the former, they became the favourites of the people.

Such a tragic exhibition resembles a comet's course, hardly visible at first, revealing itself only to the eyes astronomic eye, appears in nebulous distance in heavens, but soon soars with unheard-of and accelerating rapidity towards the central point of our system, scattering dismay among the nations of the earth, till, a moment, when least expected, with its portentous tail it overspeads half of the firmament with resplendent flame.