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
Good drama must be drastic.
Genius is, to be sure, not a matter of arbitrariness, but rather of freedom, just as wit, love, and faith, which once shall become arts and disciplines. We should demand genius from everybody, without, however, expecting it.
Both in their origins and effects, boredom and stuffy air resemble each other. They are usually generated whenever a large number of people gather together in a closed room.
Imagination must first be filled to the point of saturation with life of every kind before the moment arrives when the friction of free sociability electrifies it to such an extent that the most gentle stimulus of friendly or hostile contact elicits from it lightning sparks, luminous flashes, or shattering blows.
What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures.
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.
The difference between religion and morality lies simply in the classical division of things into the divine and the human, if one only interprets this correctly.
Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.
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.
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.
The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages.
He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.
All the classical genres are now ridiculous in their rigorous purity.
Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.