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Beauty is that which is simultaneously attractive and sublime.

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
Simultaneously
Sublime
Attractive
Beauty
Literature

More quotes by 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.
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Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.
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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.
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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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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.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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We should never invoke the spirit of antiquity as our authority. Spirits are peculiar things they cannot be grasped with the hands and be held up before others. Spirits reveal themselves only to spirits. The most direct and concise method would be, in this case as well, to prove the possession of the only redeeming faith by good works.
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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In true prose everything must be underlined.
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It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.
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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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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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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.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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No idea is isolated, but is only what it is among all ideas.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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The genuine priest always feels something higher than compassion.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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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?
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Wit is absolutely sociable spirit or aphoristic genius.
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.
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Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet especially not against their poetry.
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A family can develop only with a loving woman as its center.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel