Words matter. These are the best Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
A priest is he who lives solely in the realm of the invisible, for whom all that is visible has only the truth of an allegory.
Religion is not only a part of education, an element of humanity, but the center of everything else, always the first and the ultimate, the absolutely original.
Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.
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.
Set religion free, and a new humanity will begin.
Religion can emerge in all forms of feeling: here wild anger, there the sweetest pain; here consuming hatred, there the childlike smile of serene humility.
Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.
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.
What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures.
Ideas are infinite, original, and lively divine thoughts.
One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.
Kant introduced the concept of the negative into philosophy. Would it not also be worthwhile to try to introduce the concept of the positive into philosophy?
A so-called happy marriage corresponds to love as a correct poem to an improvised song.
Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.
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.
As the ancient commander addressed his soldiers before battle, so should the moralist speak to men in the struggle of the era.
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.
Wit as an instrument of revenge is as infamous as art is as a means of sensual titillation.
What men are among the other formations of the earth, artists are among men.
Plato’s philosophy is a dignified preface to future religion.
It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.
Man is free whenever he produces or manifests God, and through this he becomes immortal.
Considered subjectively, philosophy always begins in the middle, like an epic poem.
Morality without a sense of paradox is mean.
Think of something finite molded into the infinite, and you think of man.
Virtue is reason which has become energy.
Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.
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.
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.
Religion is absolutely unfathomable. Always and everywhere one can dig more deeply into infinities.
Like Leibniz’s possible worlds, most men are only equally entitled pretenders to existence. There are few existences.
Novels tend to end as the Paternoster begins: with the kingdom of God on earth.
Every good man progressively becomes God. To become God, to be man, and to educate oneself, are expressions that are synonymous.
The genuine priest always feels something higher than compassion.
What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.
Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos.
The historian is a prophet looking backward.
The subject of history is the gradual realization of all that is practically necessary.
Publication is to thinking as childbirth is to the first kiss.
How many authors are there among writers? Author means originator.
Mysteries are feminine; they like to veil themselves but still want to be seen and divined.
Every complete man has his genius. True virtue is genius.
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.
He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.
Eternal life and the invisible world are only to be sought in God. Only within Him do all spirits dwell. He is an abyss of individuality, the only infinite plenitude.
