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Wit as an instrument of revenge is as infamous as art is as a means of sensual titillation.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Age: 57 †
Born: 1772
Born: January 1
Died: 1829
Died: January 11
Art Theorist
Editor
Historian
Literary Critic
Literary Theorist
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
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University Teacher
Writer
Hanover
Germany
Karl Friedrich von Schlegel
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich von Schlegel
Friedrich Karl Wilhelm von Schlegel
Revenge
Instruments
Means
Art
Titillation
Mean
Infamous
Sensual
Wit
Instrument

More quotes by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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Poetry and philosophy are, according to how you take them, different spheres, different forms, or factors of religion. Try to really combine both, and you will have nothing but religion.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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Can we expect the redemption of the world from scholars? I doubt it. But the time has come for all artists to join together as a confederation in an eternal league.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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The naive is what is or appears to be natural, individual, or classical to the point of irony or to the point of continuous alternation of self-creation and self-destruction. If it is only instinct, then it is childlike, childish, or silly if it is only intention, it becomes affectation.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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When the author has no idea of what to reply to a critic, he then likes to say: you could not do it better anyway. This is the same as if a dogmatic philosopher reproached a skeptic for not being able to devise a system.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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Like Leibniz's possible worlds, most men are only equally entitled pretenders to existence. There are few existences.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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Every complete man has his genius. True virtue is genius.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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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.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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Just as the Romans were the only nation that was truly a nation, so our age is the first genuine age.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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Life is writing. The sole purpose of mankind is to engrave the thoughts of divinity onto the tablets of nature.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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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.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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To disrespect the masses is moral to honor them, lawful.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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In true prose everything must be underlined.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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The life of the artist should be distinguished from that of all other people, even in external habits. They are Brahmins, a higher caste, not ennobled by birth, however, but through deliberate self-initiation.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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Poetry should describe itself, and always be simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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All men are somewhat ridiculous and grotesque, just because they are men and in this respect artists might well be regarded as man multiplied by two. So it is, was, and shall be.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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The whole history of modern poetry is a continuous commentary on the short text of philosophy: every art should become science, and every science should become art poetry and philosophy should be united.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel