Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Biography Quotes 70 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, better known as Friedrich von Schlegel, was born in 1772 in the Electorate of Hanover and became one of the principal theorists and public voices of early German Romanticism. He initially trained for a legal career, studying at universities such as Gottingen and Leipzig, but the pull of literature and philosophy soon overshadowed the law. His early reading immersed him in classical antiquity and contemporary philosophy, and he began to publish essays that revealed a strikingly ambitious aim: to rethink poetry, criticism, and history as parts of a single, living intellectual enterprise.

Jena Romanticism and the Athenaeum
By the mid- to late 1790s, Schlegel was at the center of the Jena circle that redefined German intellectual life. Alongside his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel, and in close conversation with Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Ludwig Tieck, and others, he co-founded and co-edited the journal Athenaeum (1798, 1800). The journal's brief, brilliant run introduced the famous Athenaeum fragments, concise and daring reflections that helped invent the vocabulary of Romantic criticism. Through this milieu, he engaged with Johann Gottlieb Fichte's idealism and debated emerging positions in aesthetics and ethics with figures like Friedrich Schleiermacher. The circle, which intersected with the Weimar world of Goethe and Schiller, framed poetry as a world-making activity and criticism as a creative art.

Lucinde, Dialogue on Poetry, and Critical Positions
Schlegel's novel Lucinde (1799) became a touchstone and a scandal. Its frank exploration of love, individuality, and artistic freedom challenged prevailing moral and literary conventions. The work defended a Romantic ideal of life as an evolving artwork, and it announced a program that valued irony, fragment, and open form over classical closure. In Gespräch über die Poesie (Dialogue on Poetry, 1800), he articulated a broad theory of literature: all genres could be interpenetrated; poetry and philosophy converse; and criticism must be self-reflective. He promoted the idea that modern literature gains depth by engaging with the ancients while cultivating the free play of contemporary imagination. His reviews and essays sharpened the theoretical tools with which German readers approached Shakespeare, the Greeks, and the newest German writing.

Paris and the Turn to Oriental Studies
In the early years of the nineteenth century, Schlegel lived in Paris, where he studied languages and absorbed the era's expanding interest in the cultures of Asia. He turned with particular energy to Sanskrit, a choice that placed him among the earliest German scholars to approach Indian texts with philological rigor. From this research grew a historic comparative perspective: European languages and literatures could not be understood in isolation. The new materials suggested long, intertwined histories of language families and literary forms, and they equipped him to propose ideas about linguistic morphology and kinship that later scholars would refine.

Conversion, Vienna, and Conservative Turn
In 1808 he converted to Roman Catholicism, a step he shared with Dorothea Schlegel, the writer who had become his life partner. The conversion marked a change in tone: his political and cultural outlook moved toward a conservative defense of order, tradition, and religious foundations. Soon afterward he lived and worked in Vienna, where he lectured publicly on the history of literature and took part in the city's intellectual and diplomatic atmosphere, which included figures aligned with the statesman Klemens von Metternich. His lectures argued that the drama of Europe's cultural life could be read as a succession of formations rooted in language, religion, and national character, with modern literature best understood against a longue duree of classical and medieval inheritances. During these years he also collaborated with like-minded editors and writers, contributing to periodicals that attempted to shape public discourse during and after the Napoleonic conflicts.

Bonn Professorship and Indology
Schlegel's scholarly path culminated in an academic appointment in Bonn, where he taught literature and advanced the study of Sanskrit. He launched the Indische Bibliothek, a publication that gathered research on Indian languages and texts, and he continued to argue for the central importance of comparative philology to the humanities. His book Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians) gave systematic form to views he had developed since Paris: Sanskrit deserved a place beside Greek and Latin in the curriculum of European learning; language forms could be compared morphologically; and the study of India expanded the horizon within which European history and thought should be situated. While later specialists would revise many particulars, his insistence on comparative method and on the global reach of literary history proved enduring.

Personal Relations and Collaborations
Personal alliances shaped Schlegel's career as much as his publications. His brother August Wilhelm Schlegel, renowned for translations and criticism, was both collaborator and interlocutor; their partnership in the Athenaeum was decisive for defining Romantic theory, even as their intellectual paths later diverged. Dorothea Schlegel, born Dorothea Mendelssohn, was a novelist and translator whose presence consolidated the literary and philosophical salon culture around him; her own work, including Florentin, enriched the circle's dialogue about the modern novel. Caroline Schlegel, associated first with August Wilhelm and later with Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, participated in the Jena ferment that blended scholarship, creative writing, and philosophical speculation. Novalis and Tieck, through friendship and shared projects, reinforced a collective ambition that extended beyond any single author. Contacts with Schleiermacher kept philosophical and theological questions alive in his thinking, while the broader Weimar-Jena world, shadowed by Goethe and Schiller's authority, forced the younger Romantics to define themselves against classical ideals even as they learned from them.

Later Years and Death
In his later years Schlegel continued to lecture and publish, revisiting large themes in the philosophy of life, history, and religion. He aimed to synthesize his early Romantic commitments with his mature Catholic and conservative convictions, arguing that the free creativity of modern art could be anchored in a historical and spiritual order. While his health waned, he remained active intellectually and died in 1829 in Dresden, leaving lectures and essays that were gathered and read by audiences eager for a comprehensive view of European civilization at a moment of restoration and uncertainty.

Legacy
Schlegel's influence radiates across three domains. As a Romantic theorist, he helped define the fragment, Romantic irony, and the vision of literature as a boundless, self-reflexive endeavor. As a critic and historian of literature, he insisted on connecting the ancients with the moderns in a living conversation that included Shakespeare, medieval romance, and contemporary German writing; his approach encouraged later scholars to treat literary history as comparative and developmental. As an early Indologist and comparative philologist, he widened the European horizon, making Sanskrit and Indian philosophy part of the learned world's curriculum and modeling methods that later figures such as Franz Bopp and Wilhelm von Humboldt would refine. Writers and observers in the next generation, including Heinrich Heine, assessed both his pioneering energy and his conservative turn; even in critique they acknowledged the scale of his ambition. Through the Jena network with August Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis, Tieck, Schleiermacher, and others, he helped to establish a template for modern humanities: interdisciplinary, historically self-aware, and open to global comparison. His life traced a path from rebellious innovator to institutional scholar, and the questions he posed, about the nature of poetry, the meaning of history, and the reach of language, continue to animate literary and cultural thought.

Our collection contains 70 quotes who is written by Karl, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Art - Learning.

• 1825 Philosophy of Art (Lecture)
• 1800 Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms (Collection of Essays and Aphorisms)
• 1799 Lucinde (Novel)
• 1798 Athenaeum (Collection of Essays)
• 1797 On the Study of Greek Poetry (Essay)

• Wikipedia