Friedrich Schlegel Quotes on Knowledge
Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) was the principal theorist of early German Romanticism (Frühromantik) and, with Novalis, the architect of the philosophical programme that the Athenaeum (1798–1800) advanced as a successor to the Kantian-Fichtean systematic ambitions. The doctrine of the fragment as the proper form of philosophical thought, and the corresponding doctrine of romantic irony as the writer's ongoing self-cancellation by the very expression that articulates the position, treat knowledge as constitutively incomplete — a project of infinite approximation rather than a finite system available for closure.
Quotes
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Attributed to Friedrich Schlegel:
“A historian is a prophet looking backwards.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Schlegel:
“Irony is a permanent parabasis.”
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“Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.”
Jeder ungebildete Mensch ist die Karikatur von sich selbst. -
Attributed to Friedrich Schlegel:
“Philosophy must always remain a striving and never claim to be a possession.”
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“The romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry.”
Die romantische Poesie ist eine progressive Universalpoesie . -
“Progressive Universalpoesie (1798); in the German language, particularly in the Romantic schools, "Poesie" means both poetry as genre and faculty and the source of creativity to form poetry.”
Die romantische Poesie ist eine progressive Universalpoesie . -
“Wit is the appearance , the external flash of imagination . Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism .”
Aphorism 26, as translated in Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms (1968), p. 151 | Variant translation: | Wit is the appearance, the external flash, of fantasy. Hence its divinity and the similarity to the wit of mysticism. | As translated in The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics (1996) edited by Frederick C. Beiser, p. 131 -
“Wit is the appearance, the external flash, of fantasy. Hence its divinity and the similarity to the wit of mysticism.”
Wit is the appearance , the external flash of imagination . Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism .