Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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.

A classical work doesn't ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it.

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.

He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.

Religion can emerge in all forms of feeling: here wild anger, there the sweetest pain; here consuming hatred, there the childlike smile of serene humility.

A priest is he who lives solely in the realm of the invisible, for whom all that is visible has only the truth of an allegory.

Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.

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.

Publication is to thinking as childbirth is to the first kiss.

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

Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.

An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

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.

Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.

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

A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.

The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages.

There are writers in Germany who drink the Absolute like water; and there are books in which even the dogs make references to the Infinite.

When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics.

Wit is the appearance, the external flash, of fantasy. Hence its divinity and the similarity to the wit of mysticism.