Friedrich Schlegel (1772 – 1829)
German poet, critic and scholar.
Honour is the mysticism of legality.
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.
If there is an invisible church, then it is of the great paradox, which is inseparable from morality, and which must be distinguished from the merely philosophical. People who are so eccentric that they are completely serious in being and becoming virtuous understand one another in everything, find one another easily, and form a silent opposition against the prevailing immorality that pretends to be morality. A certain mysticism of expression, which joined with romantic fantasy and grammatical understanding, can be something charming and good, often serves as a symbol of their beautiful secrets.
There are people with whom everything they consider a means turns mysteriously into an end.
Durch die Künstler wird die Menschheit ein Individuum, indem sie Vor welt und Nachwelt in der Gegenwart verknüpfen. Sie sind das höhere Seelenorgan, wo die Lebensgeister der ganzen 15 äussern Menschheit zusammentreffen und in welchem die innere zunächst wirkt.
Religion is usually nothing but a supplement to or even a substitute for education, and nothing is religious in the strict sense which is not a product of freedom.
Jeder ungebildete Mensch ist die Karikatur von sich selbst.
Romantic poetry ... recognizes as its first commandment that the will of the poet can tolerate no law above itself.
Irony is a form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.
To live classically and to realize antiquity practically within oneself is the summit and goal of philology.
Moralität ohne Sinn für Paradoxie ist gemein.
It is equally fatal for the spirit to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two.
Auf eine ähnliche Weise sollen in der vollkommnen Litteratur alle Bücher nur Ein Buch seyn, und in einem solchen ewig werdenden Buche wird das Evangelium der Menschheit und der Bildung offenbart werden.
Man hat nur so viel Moral, als man Philosophie und Poesie hat.
Die Romane sind die sokratischen Dialoge unserer Zeit. In diese liberale Form hat sich die Lebensweisheit vor der Schulweisheit geflüchtet.