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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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Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Age: 57 †
Born: 1772
Born: January 1
Died: 1829
Died: January 11
Art Theorist
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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
Entitled
Worlds
Equally
Existence
Possible
Pretenders
Men
Leibniz
Like
Existences
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Pretender

More quotes by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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If one writes or reads novels from the point of view of psychology, it is very inconsistent and petty to want to shy away from even the slowest and most detailed analysis of the most unnatural lusts, gruesome tortures, shocking infamy, and disgusting sensual or spiritual impotence.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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The following are the universally fundamental laws of literary communication: 1. one must have something to communicate 2. one must have someone to whom to communicate it 3. one must really communicate it, not merely express it for oneself alone. Otherwise it would be more to the point to remain silent.
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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Original love never appears in pure form, but in manifold veils and shapes, such as confidence, humility, reverence, serenity, asfaithfulness and modesty, as gratefulness but primarily as longing and wistful melancholy.
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?
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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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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The highest good and solely useful is liberal education.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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In true prose everything must be underlined.
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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The obsession with moderation is the spirit of castrated narrow-mindedness.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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With respect to ingenious subconsciousness, I think, philosophers might well rival poets.
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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Even a friendly conversation which cannot be at any given moment be broken off voluntarily with complete arbitrariness has something illiberal about it. An artist, however, who is able and wants to express himself completely, who keeps nothing to himself and would wish to say everything he knows, is very much to be pitied.
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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We do not see God, but everywhere we see something divine first and most typically in the center of a reasonable man, in the depth of a living human product. You can directly feel and think nature, the universe, but not the Godhead. Only the man among men can poetize and think divinely and live with religion.
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
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Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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Honor is the mysticism of legality
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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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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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