Every good man progressively becomes God. To become God, to be man, and to educate oneself, are expressions that are synonymous.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that the journey of becoming a better person is akin to a divine transformation, where self-education plays a crucial role.
Schlegel reflects on the idea that personal growth and moral development elevate an individual closer to a divine state. The processes of self-education and the pursuit of goodness are intertwined with the essence of humanity itself. By exploring and enhancing one's own character, a person transcends their earthly limitations, embodying qualities often attributed to the divine.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about personal development.
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.
If a Christian really believed that his neighbor will be tortured in all eternity in Hell, he should try day and night to persuade him to repent and believe. How sad that this doesn't happen.
The time will come when all people will view with horror light way in which society and its courts of law now take human life; and when that time comes, the way will be clear to device some better method of dealing with poverty and ignorance and their frequent byproducts, which we call crime.
The human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.
But where are you going to, Helen? Can you see? Do you know?-I believe; I have faith: I am going to God.-Where is God? What is God?-My maker and yours, who will never destroy what He created. I rely implicitly on His power, and confide wholly in His goodness: I count the hours till that eventful one arrives which shall restore me to Him, reveal Him to me.
I planted my self in the middle of a great many Glasses full of Dew, tied fast about me, upon which the Sun so violently darted his Rays, that the Heat, which attracted them, as it does the thickest Clouds, carried me up so high, that at length I found my self above the middle Region of the Air.
...human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their ignorance of the misuse.
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