Friedrich Schlegel Quotes
1772–1829 Germany
- Germany
- Novelists
- Philosophers
- Playwrights
- Poets
Also known as: Friedrich von Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Schlegel
Random Friedrich Schlegel quote
77 quotes
Take playfulness seriously, and you will apprehend what is at the center and rediscover your revered art in a more sublime light.
One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.
You live only insofar as you live according to your own ideas.
Like the Roman senators, true artists are a nation of kings.
Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality.
Morality without sense for paradox is vulgar.
The doctrine of the transmigration of souls was indigenous to India and was brought into Greece by Pythagoras.
Novels are the Socratic dialogs of our time. This free form has become the refuge of common sense in its flight from pedantry.
Whatever can be done while poetry and philosophy are separated has been done and accomplished. So the time has come to unite the two.
Only by being cultivated does a human being … become altogether human and permeated by humanity.
The Satan of the Italian and English poets may be poetic; but the German Satan is satanic; and thus one could say that Satan is a German invention.
Athenäum (1798)
Do not waste your faith and love on the political world, but, in the divine world of science and art, offer up your inmost being in a fiery stream of eternal creation.
It is individuality which is the original and eternal within man; personality doesn’t matter so much. To pursue the education and development of this individuality as one’s highest vocation would be a divine egoism.
Through artists mankind becomes an individual, in that they unite the past and the future in the present. They are the higher organ of the soul, where the life spirits of entire external mankind meet and in which inner mankind first acts.
To point out historically... the progress of this restoration in the various periods of the world, constitutes the object of the "Philosophy of History."
The Philosophy of History (1852)
An artist is someone who carries his center within himself. Whoever lacks such a center has to choose some particular leader and mediator outside of himself.
As a transitional condition, skepticism is logical insurrection; as a system, it is anarchy. Skeptical method would therefore be much the same as rule by insurgents.
Athenäum (1798)
There are as many gods as there are ideals. And further, the relation of the true artist and the true human being to his ideals is absolutely religious. The man for whom this inner divine service is the end and occupation of all his life is a priest, and this is how everyone can and should become a priest.
To give the community of artists a particular purpose would mean … debasing the community of saints into a state.
The Kantians’ conception of duty relates to the commandment of honor, the voice of God and one’s calling in us, as the dried plant to the fresh flower on the living stem.