Success Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Schlegel smuggles a quiet revolution into a seemingly austere definition: the artist is not primarily a maker of objects but a maker of consciousness. By putting the “goal and center of life” on “to form his mind,” he yanks art away from the marketplace of results and plants it in an inner discipline. The line is both manifesto and gatekeeping. It elevates the artist into a kind of secular monk, committed to continuous self-shaping, and it implies that technique, fame, even productivity are secondary to a cultivated sensibility.

The phrasing matters. “Form” suggests intention, structure, even resistance; the mind isn’t a natural fountain that simply gushes inspiration, it’s clay that must be worked. Schlegel is writing out of early German Romanticism, a moment obsessed with Bildung (self-cultivation) and with the idea that modern life fractures the self. In that context, art becomes a counter-program: a method for reassembling perception, ethics, and imagination into something coherent enough to withstand a rapidly shifting world.

There’s subtextual provocation, too. If the artist’s central task is mental formation, then art is less an “expression” of who you already are than a technology for becoming someone else. That undercuts the easy romantic myth of the naturally gifted genius and replaces it with a more demanding ideal: artistry as lifelong training in attention. It’s also a subtle claim about power. Whoever gets to “form” a mind gets to decide what counts as reality worth seeing, and Schlegel wants that authority to belong to the artist.