Friedrich Schlegel quotes - page 2

Many a witty inspiration is like the surprising reunion of befriended thoughts after a long separation. (Friedrich Schlegel)
Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.
Friedrich Schlegel
Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos.
Friedrich Schlegel
[A]ll those countless battles-those endless, and... for the greater part, useless wars, of which... fills up for so many thousand years... are but little atoms compared with the great whole of human destiny.
Friedrich Schlegel
Art and works of art do not make an artist; sense and enthusiasm and instinct do.
Friedrich Schlegel
Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.
Friedrich Schlegel
Mysteries are feminine; they like to veil themselves but still want to be seen and divined.
Friedrich Schlegel
The romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry.
Friedrich Schlegel
A mediator is one who perceives the divinity within himself and who self-destructively sacrifices himself in order to reveal, communicate, and represent to all mankind this divinity in his conduct and actions, in his words and works.
Friedrich Schlegel
What am I proud of, and what can I be proud of as an artist? Of the decision that separated and isolated me forever from everything ordinary.
Friedrich Schlegel
To live classically and to realize antiquity practically within oneself is the summit and goal of philology. (Friedrich Schlegel)
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.
Friedrich Schlegel
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.
Friedrich Schlegel
The mind understands something only insofar as it absorbs it like a seed into itself, nurtures it, and lets it grow into blossom and fruit. Therefore scatter holy seeds into the soil of the spirit.
Friedrich Schlegel
Only a man who is at one with the world can be at one with himself.
Friedrich Schlegel
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.
Friedrich Schlegel
In England ... everything becomes professional ... even the rogues of that island are pedants.
Friedrich Schlegel
You live only insofar as you live according to your own ideas.
Friedrich Schlegel
There are people with whom everything they consider a means turns mysteriously into an end.
Friedrich Schlegel
It is equally fatal for the spirit to have a system and to have none. One must thus decide to join the two.
Friedrich Schlegel
The artist should have as little desire to rule as to serve. He can only create, do nothing but create, and so help the state only by ... exalting politicians and economists into artists. (Friedrich Schlegel)
The need to raise itself above humanity is humanity's prime characteristic.
Friedrich Schlegel
Like the Roman senators, true artists are a nation of kings.
Friedrich Schlegel
Expect nothing more from philosophy than a voice, language and grammar of the instinct for Godliness that lies at its origin, and, essentially, is philosophy itself.
Friedrich Schlegel
The doctrine of the transmigration of souls was indigenous to India and was brought into Greece by Pythagoras.
Friedrich Schlegel