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
The highest good and solely useful is liberal education.
Life is writing. The sole purpose of mankind is to engrave the thoughts of divinity onto the tablets of nature.
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.
If one writes or reads novels from the point of view of psychology, it is very inconsistent and petty to want to shy away from even the slowest and most detailed analysis of the most unnatural lusts, gruesome tortures, shocking infamy, and disgusting sensual or spiritual impotence.
The symmetry and organization of history teaches us that mankind, during its existence and development, genuinely was and became an individual, a person. In this great personality of mankind, God became man.
There is so much poetry, and yet nothing is more rare than a poetic work. This is what the masses make out of poetical sketches, studies, aphorisms, trends, ruins, and raw material.
Wit is absolutely sociable spirit or aphoristic genius.
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.
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.
There is no self-knowledge except historical self-knowledge. No one knows what he is if he doesn't know what his contemporaries are.
An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.
From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.
In the world of language, or in other words in the world of art and liberal education, religion necessarily appears as mythology or as Bible.
In true prose everything must be underlined.