Publication is to thinking as childbirth is to the first kiss.
Interpretation
This quote compares the act of sharing thoughts to the profound experience of childbirth, suggesting that true expression is a significant and transformative process.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel's quote draws a parallel between the act of publication, which allows thoughts to reach an audience, and childbirth, a profound and altering experience. Just as childbirth is a culmination of nurturing, love, and pain that leads to new life, publication represents a significant moment where one's thoughts are born into the world, marking a transition from inner contemplation to public engagement. Both processes involve vulnerability, creativity, and the hope of connection, underscoring that true expression requires not only effort but also the courage to share one's innermost ideas with others.
In practice
In a speech on the importance of sharing our ideas, one might say this quote to emphasize the value of publication.
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.
I always felt the true test of a man's character is how he treats people he can't use.
To unfold the secret laws and relations of those high faculties of thought by which all beyond the merely perceptive knowledge of the world and of ourselves is attained or matured, is a object which does not stand in need of commendation to a rational mind.
Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.
It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle.
Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others - the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.
All of us, poor & rich alike, have been conditioned by our upbringings. Impoverished men & women may become lulled into a state of "learned helplessness" without hope to change their lives. Likewise, the wealthy can walk in a state of "learned blindness" ignoring the desperation of the local & global poor.
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