Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.
Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.
Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos.
Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.
Religion is absolutely unfathomable. Always and everywhere one can dig more deeply into infinities.
Morality without a sense of paradox is mean.
Wit as an instrument of revenge is as infamous as art is as a means of sensual titillation.
It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.
Reason is mechanical, wit chemical, and genius organic spirit.
When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics.
The main thing is to know something and to say it.
About no subject is there less philosophizing than about philosophy.
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.
Every complete man has his genius. True virtue is genius.
All the classical genres are now ridiculous in their rigorous purity.
Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.
Think of something finite molded into the infinite, and you think of man.
What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.
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.
What men are among the other formations of the earth, artists are among men.
Novels tend to end as the Paternoster begins: with the kingdom of God on earth.
A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.
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.
Many a witty inspiration is like the surprising reunion of befriended thoughts after a long separation.
The genuine priest always feels something higher than compassion.
The historian is a prophet looking backward.
As the ancient commander addressed his soldiers before battle, so should the moralist speak to men in the struggle of the era.
Like Leibniz's possible worlds, most men are only equally entitled pretenders to existence. There are few existences.
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.
Art and works of art do not make an artist; sense and enthusiasm and instinct do.
There are writers in Germany who drink the Absolute like water; and there are books in which even the dogs make references to the Infinite.
Witty inspirations are the proverbs of the educated.
Nothing is more witty and grotesque than ancient mythology and Christianity; that is because they are so mystical.
One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.
Plato's philosophy is a dignified preface to future religion.
No idea is isolated, but is only what it is among all ideas.
What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures.
Mysteries are feminine; they like to veil themselves but still want to be seen and divined.
Considered subjectively, philosophy always begins in the middle, like an epic poem.
Religion and morals are symmetrically opposed, just like poetry and philosophy.Collection: Philosophy
Life is writing. The sole purpose of mankind is to engrave the thoughts of divinity onto the tablets of nature.Collection: Writing
Original love never appears in pure form, but in manifold veils and shapes, such as confidence, humility, reverence, serenity, asfaithfulness and modesty, as gratefulness; but primarily as longing and wistful melancholy.Collection: Humility
Laziness is the one divine fragment of a godlike existence left to man from paradise.Collection: Men
True love should be, according to its origin, entirely arbitrary and entirely accidental at the same time; it should seem both necessary and free; in keeping with its nature, however, it should be both destiny and virtue and appear as a mystery and a miracle.Collection: Destiny
The meanest authors have at least this similarity with the great author of heaven and earth, that they usually say after a completed day of work: "And behold, what he had done was good.Collection: Creativity
One should have wit, but not wish to have it; otherwise there will be witticism, the Alexandrian style of wit.Collection: Should Have
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.Collection: Education
The naive which is simultaneously beautiful, poetic, and idealistic, must be both intention and instinct. The essence of intention, in this sense, is freedom. Consciousness is far from intention. There is a certain enamoured contemplation of one's own naturalness or silliness which itself is unspeakably silly. Intention does not necessarily require a profound calculation or plan.Collection: Beautiful
All the great truths are basically trivial and so we have to find new ways, preferably paradoxical ways, of expressing them, in order to keep them from falling into oblivion.Collection: Fall
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?Collection: Father