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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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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
Men
Respect
Shall
Literature
Multiplied
Artist
Grotesque
Two
Regarded
Wells
Somewhat
Might
Ridiculous
Well
Artists

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.
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The highest good and solely useful is liberal education.
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Most thoughts are only profiles of thoughts. They must be inverted and synthesized with their antipodes. Thus many philosophical writings become very interesting which would not have been so otherwise.
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Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.
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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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Religion is usually nothing but a supplement to or even a substitute for education, and nothing is religious in the strict sense which is not a product of freedom. Thus one can say: The freer, the more religious and the more education, the less religion.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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In true prose everything must be underlined.
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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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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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The German national character is a favorite subject of character experts, probably because the less mature a nation, the more she is an object of criticism and not of history.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.
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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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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Poetry should describe itself, and always be simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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Honor is the mysticism of legality
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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Laziness is the one divine fragment of a godlike existence left to man from paradise.
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No idea is isolated, but is only what it is among all ideas.
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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.
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