Beauty is that which is simultaneously attractive and sublime.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
A family can develop only with a loving woman as its center.
Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.
Mysteries are feminine; they like to veil themselves but still want to be seen and divined.
Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.
Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos.
Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.
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.
Reason is mechanical, wit chemical, and genius organic spirit.
Art and works of art do not make an artist; sense and enthusiasm and instinct do.
Many a witty inspiration is like the surprising reunion of befriended thoughts after a long separation.
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.
The historian is a prophet looking backward.
God is each truly and exalted thing, therefore the individual himself to the highest degree. But are not nature and the world individuals?
Morality without a sense of paradox is mean.
Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality.
All the classical genres are now ridiculous in their rigorous purity.
Wit as an instrument of revenge is as infamous as art is as a means of sensual titillation.
A so-called happy marriage corresponds to love as a correct poem to an improvised song.
Plato's philosophy is a dignified preface to future religion.
It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.
Set religion free, and a new humanity will begin.
What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.
Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.
One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.
Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.
He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion.
Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.
The subject of history is the gradual realization of all that is practically necessary.
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.
Ideas are infinite, original, and lively divine thoughts.
Religion must completely encircle the spirit of ethical man like his element, and this luminous chaos of divine thoughts and feelings is called enthusiasm.
Nothing is more witty and grotesque than ancient mythology and Christianity; that is because they are so mystical.
Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form.
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.
In true prose everything must be underlined.
Virtue is reason which has become energy.
About no subject is there less philosophizing than about philosophy.
Like Leibniz's possible worlds, most men are only equally entitled pretenders to existence. There are few existences.
Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.
He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.
A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.
An artist is he for whom the goal and center of life is to form his mind.
There is no self-knowledge but an historical one. No one knows what he himself is who does not know his fellow men, especially the most prominent one of the community, the master's master, the genius of the age.
Think of something finite molded into the infinite, and you think of man.
Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.
Wit is an explosion of the compound spirit.
Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.
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.
The genuine priest always feels something higher than compassion.
