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 Schlegel
Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.
Man is free whenever he produces or manifests God, and through this he becomes immortal.
The essential point of view of Christianity is sin.
Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.
Religion must completely encircle the spirit of ethical man like his element, and this luminous chaos of divine thoughts and feelings is called enthusiasm.
The difference between religion and morality lies simply in the classical division of things into the divine and the human, if one only interprets this correctly.
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.
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.
A family can develop only with a loving woman as its center.
Every good man progressively becomes God. To become God, to be man, and to educate oneself, are expressions that are synonymous.
Since philosophy now criticizes everything it comes across, a critique of philosophy would be nothing less than a just reprisal.
Morality without a sense of paradox is mean.
Ideas are infinite, original, and lively divine thoughts.
Virtue is reason which has become energy.
As the ancient commander addressed his soldiers before battle, so should the moralist speak to men in the struggle of the era.
Many a witty inspiration is like the surprising reunion of befriended thoughts after a long separation.
Form your life humanly, and you have done enough: but you will never reach the height of art and the depth of science without something divine.
The subject of history is the gradual realization of all that is practically necessary.
God is each truly and exalted thing, therefore the individual himself to the highest degree. But are not nature and the world individuals?
When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics.
Religion is not only a part of education, an element of humanity, but the center of everything else, always the first and the ultimate, the absolutely original.
Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy.
Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.
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.
An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.
Novels tend to end as the Paternoster begins: with the kingdom of God on earth.
Reason is mechanical, wit chemical, and genius organic spirit.
A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.
In the world of language, or in other words in the world of art and liberal education, religion necessarily appears as mythology or as Bible.
Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.
Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality.
In true prose everything must be underlined.
The genuine priest always feels something higher than compassion.
Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.
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.
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.
Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.
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.
The German national character is a favorite subject of character experts, probably because the less mature a nation, the more she is an object of criticism and not of history.
Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.
Kant introduced the concept of the negative into philosophy. Would it not also be worthwhile to try to introduce the concept of the positive into philosophy?
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.
An artist is he for whom the goal and center of life is to form his mind.
Set religion free, and a new humanity will begin.
How many authors are there among writers? Author means originator.
The historian is a prophet looking backward.
Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.
Wit is an explosion of the compound spirit.
Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.
