199 Quotes by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

The meanest authors have at least this similarity with the great author of heaven and earth, that they usually say after a completed day of work: "And behold, what he had done was good.

As the ancient commander addressed his soldiers before battle, so should the moralist speak to men in the struggle of the era.

Man is free whenever he produces or manifests God, and through this he becomes immortal.

The life of the artist should be distinguished from that of all other people, even in external habits. They are Brahmins, a highercaste, not ennobled by birth, however, but by deliberate self-initiation.

Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

Through artists mankind becomes an individual, in that they unite the past and the future in the present. They are the higher organ of the soul, where the life spirits of entire external mankind meet and in which inner mankind first acts.

Publication is to thinking as childbirth is to the first kiss.

Whoever has not arrived at the clear insight that there might be greatness entirely outside his own sphere for which he has no understanding, whoever does not have at least a dim inkling in which area of the human spirit this greatness might be situated: he is within his own sphere either without genius, or he has not educated himself up to the point of the classical attitude.

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?