Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Karl Wilhelm FriedrichSchlegel, usually cited as Friedrich Schlegel, was a German poet, literary critic, philosopher, philologist and Indologist. With his older brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel, he was one of the main figures of the Jena romantics. He was a zealous promoter of the Romantic movement and inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Adam Mickiewicz and Kazimierz Brodziński. Schlegel was a pioneer in Indo-European studies, comparative linguistics, in what became known as Grimm's law, and morphological typology. As a young man he was...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth10 March 1772
CountryGermany
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel quotes about
Even a friendly conversation which cannot be at any given moment be broken off voluntarily with complete arbitrariness has something illiberal about it. An artist, however, who is able and wants to express himself completely, who keeps nothing to himself and would wish to say everything he knows, is very much to be pitied.
Sense (for a particular art, science, human being, and so forth) is divided spirit; self-restraint is consequently the result of self-creation and self-destruction.
We should never invoke the spirit of antiquity as our authority. Spirits are peculiar things; they cannot be grasped with the hands and be held up before others. Spirits reveal themselves only to spirits. The most direct and concise method would be, in this case as well, to prove the possession of the only redeeming faith by good works.
I can no longer say my love and your love; they are both alike in their perfect mutuality.
The naive which is simultaneously beautiful, poetic, and idealistic, must be both intention and instinct. The essence of intention, in this sense, is freedom. Consciousness is far from intention. There is a certain enamoured contemplation of one's own naturalness or silliness which itself is unspeakably silly. Intention does not necessarily require a profound calculation or plan.
The naive is what is or appears to be natural, individual, or classical to the point of irony or to the point of continuous alternation of self-creation and self-destruction. If it is only instinct, then it is childlike, childish, or silly; if it is only intention, it becomes affectation.
The obsession with moderation is the spirit of castrated narrow-mindedness.
Religion is absolutely unfathomable. Always and everywhere one can dig more deeply into infinities.
It is individuality which is the original and eternal within man; personality doesn't matter so much. To pursue the education anddevelopment of this individuality as one's highest vocation would be a divine egoism.
There is no self-knowledge except historical self-knowledge. No one knows what he is if he doesn't know what his contemporaries are.
Because Christianity is a religion of death, it could be treated with the utmost realism, and it could have its orgies, just likethe old religion of nature and life.
The few existing writings against Kantian philosophy are the most important documents in the case history of sound common sense.
The highest good and solely useful is liberal education.
A genuinely free and educated man should be able to tune himself, as one tunes a musical instrument, absolutely arbitrarily, at his convenience at any time and to any degree, philosophically or philologically, critically or poetically, historically or rhetorically, in ancient or modern form.