QuoteProject
Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Women embody poetic qualities inherent in their essence, reducing their need for external poetry.

This quote suggests that the intrinsic qualities of women—such as emotion, creativity, and beauty—are akin to poetry itself. As a result, they may not feel as strong a necessity for poetry as men do, because their very being encapsulates the depth and artistry often sought in poetic expression.

Themes

WomenPoetryEssenceCreativityArt

In practice

Example use cases

In a speech celebrating women's contributions to art and literature, you might quote this to highlight their innate creativity.

More from 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.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich SchlegelRead
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.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich SchlegelRead
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.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich SchlegelRead
He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich SchlegelRead
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.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich SchlegelRead
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.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich SchlegelRead

Similar quotes

It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color - not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.
Henri MatisseRead
There must be so many people who have various artistic talents that, for whatever reason, just have no way of expressing them. Either they have no support from their family or they live in a part of the world, maybe they've never heard a piano or seen a piano.
Stephen HoughRead
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
Susan SontagRead
I am imbued with the notion that a Muse is necessarily a dead woman, inaccessible or absent; that a poetic structure - like the canon, which is only a hole surrounded by steel - can be based only on what one does not have; and that ultimately one can write only to fill a void or at the least to situate, in relation to the most lucid part of ourselves, the place where this incommensurable abyss yawns within us.
Michel LeirisRead
And when they encounter works of art which show that using new media can lead to new experiences and to new consciousness, and expand our senses, our perception, our intelligence, our sensibility, then they will become interested in this music.
Karlheinz StockhausenRead
The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.
Flannery O'ConnorRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.