199 Quotes by 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.

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

All the great truths are basically trivial and so we have to find new ways, preferably paradoxical ways, of expressing them, in order to keep them from falling into oblivion.

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.

Witty inspirations are the proverbs of the educated.

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.

A good preface must be the root and the square of the book at the same time.

If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.

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