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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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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
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Hanover
Germany
Karl Friedrich von Schlegel
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich von Schlegel
Friedrich Karl Wilhelm von Schlegel
Moderns
Ancients
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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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Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.
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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.
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One should have wit, but not wish to have it otherwise there will be witticism, the Alexandrian style of wit.
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Wit is the appearance, the external flash, of fantasy. Hence its divinity and the similarity to the wit of mysticism.
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Through artists mankind becomes an individual, in that they unite the past and the future in the present. They are the higher organ of the soul, where the life spirits of entire external mankind meet and in which inner mankind first acts.
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I have expressed some ideas that point to the center I have saluted the dawn in my way, from my point of view. He who knows the way should do the same, in his way, and from his point of view.
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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.
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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.
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Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.
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Considered subjectively, philosophy always begins in the middle, like an epic poem.
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Life is writing. The sole purpose of mankind is to engrave the thoughts of divinity onto the tablets of nature.
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An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.
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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.
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As the ancient commander addressed his soldiers before battle, so should the moralist speak to men in the struggle of the era.
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Wit is absolutely sociable spirit or aphoristic genius.
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What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures.
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Morality without a sense of paradox is mean.
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In the ancients, one sees the accomplished letter of entire poetry: in the moderns, one has the presentiment of the spirit in becoming.
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Man is free whenever he produces or manifests God, and through this he becomes immortal.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel