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Wit is the appearance, the external flash, of fantasy. Hence its divinity and the similarity to the wit of mysticism.

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
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Hanover
Germany
Karl Friedrich von Schlegel
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich von Schlegel
Friedrich Karl Wilhelm von Schlegel
Character
Flash
External
Wit
Witty
Appearance
Similarity
Fantasy
Mysticism
Imagination
Hence
Literature
Divinity

More quotes by 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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Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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In order to be able to write well upon a subject, one must have ceased to be interested in it the thought which is to be soberlyexpressed must already be entirely past and no longer be one's actual concern.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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If the mystical lovers of the arts, who consider all criticism dissection and all dissection destruction of enjoyment, thought logically, an exclamation like Goodness alive! would be the best criticism of the most deserving work of art. There are critiques which say nothing but that, only they do so more extensively.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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If you want to penetrate into the heart of physics, then let yourself be initiated into the mysteries of poetry.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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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.
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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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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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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All artists are self-sacrificing human beings, and to become an artist is nothing but to devote oneself to the subterranean gods.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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The history of imitation of the older literature, particularly abroad, has among other advantages this one, that the important concepts of unintentional parody and passive wit can be deduced from it most easily and comprehensively.
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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German writings attain popularity through a great name, or through personalities, or through good connections, or through effort,or through moderate immorality, or through accomplished incomprehensibility, or through harmonious platitude, or through versatile boredom, or through constant striving after the absolute.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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Those works whose ideal has not as much living reality and, as it were, personality as the beloved one or a friend had better remain unwritten. They would at least never become works of art.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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The highest good and solely useful is liberal education.
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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Is it not superfluous to write more than one novel if the writer has not become, say, a new man? Obviously, all the novels of an author not infrequently belong together and are to a certain degree only one novel.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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Reason is mechanical, wit chemical, and genius organic spirit.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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Every form of life is in its origin not natural, but divine and human for it must spring from love, just as there can be no reason without spirit.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel