Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Who was Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel?

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel was a German poet, literary critic, philosopher, philologist and indologist. With his older brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel, he was one of the main figures of the Jena romantics. He was a zealous promoter of the Romantic movement and inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Adam Mickiewicz and Kazimierz Brodziński. Schlegel was a pioneer in Indo-European studies, comparative linguistics, in what became known as Grimm's law, and morphological typology. As a young man he was an atheist, a radical, and an individualist. Ten years later, the same Schlegel converted to Catholicism. Around 1810 he was a diplomat and journalist in the service of Metternich, surrounded by monks and pious men of society.

Famous Quotes:

• Good drama must be drastic.
• An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.
• Genius is, to be sure, not a matter of arbitrariness, but rather of freedom, just as wit, love, and faith, which once shall become arts and disciplines. We should demand genius from everybody, without, however, expecting it.
• Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.
• Virtue is reason which has become energy.
• Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.
• It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.
• A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.
• In actual life every great enterprise begins with and takes its first forward step in faith.
• What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures.