Life & Wisdom Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

“Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center” is Romanticism doing what it does best: turning contradiction into a method. Schlegel isn’t offering a cozy plea for moderation. He’s arguing that the “center” worth having is not the bland midpoint between two safe opinions, but a higher synthesis that only becomes visible when you take opposing forces seriously on their own terms.

As a poet-critic at the dawn of German Romanticism, Schlegel watched Enlightenment rationalism harden into system and etiquette. The Romantics pushed back by elevating the fragment, the paradox, the unfinished. In that context, “extremes” aren’t just political poles; they’re the big binaries of modern life: reason and feeling, classical form and experimental freedom, irony and sincerity, art as autonomous play and art as moral force. Schlegel’s own critical style thrives on this double-vision, where irony doesn’t cancel belief but keeps it agile.

The subtext is a provocation aimed at complacency. If you stay in the “reasonable” middle too early, you don’t get balance; you get complacent compromise. Schlegel suggests you earn the center by stretching to the edges, letting each extreme expose what the other lacks, until a more truthful stance emerges. It’s a philosophy of creative tension: the poem (and the self) becomes most alive where opposites collide, not where they politely average out. In a culture addicted to neat categories, Schlegel insists the real clarity lives in the messiest, most dynamic overlap.