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
All the classical genres are now ridiculous in their rigorous purity.
When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics.
He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.
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.
The subject of history is the gradual realization of all that is practically necessary.
Witty inspirations are the proverbs of the educated.
Novels tend to end as the Paternoster begins: with the kingdom of God on earth.
Nothing is more witty and grotesque than ancient mythology and Christianity; that is because they are so mystical.
The need to raise itself above humanity is humanity's main characteristic.
The obsession with moderation is the spirit of castrated narrow-mindedness.
Every form of life is in its origin not natural, but divine and human; for it must spring from love, just as there can be no reason without spirit.
God the father, and even more often the devil himself, appears at times in the place of fate in the modern tragedy. Why is it thatthis has not induced any scholar to develop a theory of the diabolical genre?
A classification is a definition comprising a system of definitions.
The most important thing in love is the sense for one another, and the highest thing the faith in one another. Devotion is the expression of that faith, and pleasure can revive and enhance that sense, even if not create it, as is commonly thought. Therefore, sensuality can delude bad persons for a short time into thinking they could love each other.