Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Men Quotations

Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.

Think of something finite molded into the infinite, and you think of man.

Every complete man has his genius. True virtue is genius.

As the ancient commander addressed his soldiers before battle, so should the moralist speak to men in the struggle of the era.

Man is free whenever he produces or manifests God, and through this he becomes immortal.

Like Leibniz's possible worlds, most men are only equally entitled pretenders to existence. There are few existences.

Duty is for Kant the One and All. Out of the duty of gratitude, he claims, one has to defend and esteem the ancients; and only out of duty has he become a great man.

Every good man progressively becomes God. To become God, to be man, and to educate oneself, are expressions that are synonymous.

What men are among the other formations of the earth, artists are among men.

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.

There is no self-knowledge but an historical one. No one knows what he himself is who does not know his fellow men, especially the most prominent one of the community, the master's master, the genius of the age.

Religion must completely encircle the spirit of ethical man like his element, and this luminous chaos of divine thoughts and feelings is called enthusiasm.

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.

An artist is he who has his center within himself. He who lacks this must choose a particular leader and mediator outside of himself, not forever, however, but only at first. For man cannot exist without a living center, and if he does not have it within himself, he may seek it only in a human being. Only a human being and his center can stimulate and awaken that of another.

Prudishness is pretense of innocence without innocence. Women have to remain prudish as long as men are sentimental, dense, and evil enough to demand of them eternal innocence and lack of education. For innocence is the only thing which can ennoble lack of education.

Nothing is more piquant than when a man of genius possesses mannerisms; not so when they possess him -- this leads to spiritual petrification.

The symmetry and organization of history teaches us that mankind, during its existence and development, genuinely was and became an individual, a person. In this great personality of mankind, God became man.

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.

It is individuality which is the original and eternal within man; personality doesn't matter so much. To pursue the education anddevelopment of this individuality as one's highest vocation would be a divine egoism.

Philosophy is the true home of irony, which might be defined as logical beauty: for wherever men are philosophizing in spoken or written dialogues, and provided they are not entirely systematic, irony ought to be produced and postulated; even the Stoics regarded urbanity as a virtue.

All thinking of the religious man is etymological, a reduction of all concepts to the original intuition, to the characteristic.

As long as the artist invents and is inspired, he remains in a constrained state of mind, at least for the purpose of communication. He then wants to say everything, which is the wrong tendency of young geniuses or the right prejudice of old bunglers. Thus, he fails to recognize the value and dignity of self-restraint, which is indeed for both the artist and the man the first and the last, the most necessary and the highest goal.

Every relationship of man to the infinite is religion, namely of a man in the full abundance of his humanity. Whenever a mathematician calculates infinity, that, to be sure, is not religion. Infinity conceived in this abundance is the Godhead.

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...

Just as a child is really a thing that wants to become a man, so is the poem an object of nature that wants to become an object ofart.

Separate religion from morality, and you have the true energy for evil within man, the terrible, cruel, devastating, and inhuman principle which naturally lies in his spirit. Here the division of the indivisible punishes itself most awfully.

Laziness is the one divine fragment of a godlike existence left to man from paradise.