Life & Wisdom Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Schlegel turns criticism into physiology, and the metaphor is doing more than being cute. A reader who "ruminates" is not the tourist skimming a landscape; he is the cow chewing the same mouthful again, extracting nutrients other people never knew were there. The punch line, "more than one stomach", is Schlegel’s way of insisting that criticism is digestive labor: slow, repetitive, a little unglamorous, and ultimately transformative. You don’t just consume a work; you break it down, ferment it, reassemble it into new insight.

The subtext is a rebuke to the quick-take culture of his own era: the salon verdict, the newspaper judgment, the critic as executioner with a single decisive sentence. Schlegel’s ideal critic has endurance and multiplicity. More than one stomach implies more than one mode of reading: aesthetic pleasure, historical awareness, philosophical argument, formal scrutiny, moral discomfort. You need capacity for contradiction, too - to hold what you admire and what you reject in the same body long enough for something honest to happen.

Context matters. Early German Romanticism, where Schlegel lived, treated criticism as a creative act, not a parasitic one: fragments, aphorisms, and reviews were laboratories for new ways of thinking about art. The joke lands because it’s also a program. Criticism, for Schlegel, isn’t a verdict at the end of reading; it’s the second and third digestion that makes reading matter.