Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Literature Quotations

Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.

Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.

Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.

An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.

One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.

Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.

Mysteries are feminine; they like to veil themselves but still want to be seen and divined.

Nothing is more witty and grotesque than ancient mythology and Christianity; that is because they are so mystical.

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

Wit is an explosion of the compound spirit.

Form your life humanly, and you have done enough: but you will never reach the height of art and the depth of science without something divine.

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.

How many authors are there among writers? Author means originator.

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.

Duty is for Kant the One and All. Out of the duty of gratitude, he claims, one has to defend and esteem the ancients; and only out of duty has he become a great man.

Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.

Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality.

Morality without a sense of paradox is mean.

He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion.

Witty inspirations are the proverbs of the educated.

The subject of history is the gradual realization of all that is practically necessary.

Novels tend to end as the Paternoster begins: with the kingdom of God on earth.

Religion is absolutely unfathomable. Always and everywhere one can dig more deeply into infinities.

The essential point of view of Christianity is sin.

A classical work doesn't ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it.

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.

Beauty is that which is simultaneously attractive and sublime.

What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.

Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.

Poetry should describe itself, and always be simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry.

The historian is a prophet looking backward.

Whoever could properly characterize Goethe's Meister would have actually expressed what is the timely trend in literature. He would be able, as far as literary criticism is concerned, to rest.

The history of imitation of the older literature, particularly abroad, has among other advantages this one, that the important concepts of unintentional parody and passive wit can be deduced from it most easily and comprehensively.

In true prose everything must be underlined.