Life & Wisdom Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

“Good society” gets unmasked here not as a sanctuary of taste but as a stage set: elegant, curated, and fundamentally fake. Schlegel’s jab lands because he chooses “mosaic,” a word that flatters at first glance. A mosaic is artful, intricate, expensive. But it’s also made of fragments, arranged to produce an image that isn’t whole in itself. That’s his diagnosis of elite social life: a composition of pieces - manners, titles, conversational tricks, fashionable opinions - assembled into something that reads as “culture” from a distance.

Then comes the crueler turn: “polished caricatures.” Caricature isn’t mere impersonation; it’s exaggeration that reduces a person to a legible type. Add “polished” and Schlegel skewers the way refinement can become a high-gloss finish applied to shallow identities. People in “good society” aren’t raw hypocrites; they’re expertly edited versions of themselves, sanded down for public consumption until the simplification passes for character.

The context matters: Schlegel sits in the Romantic era, when artists and thinkers were increasingly suspicious of Enlightenment social rationality and salon culture’s performance of “reasonableness.” His line carries that Romantic hunger for the organic, the authentic, the singular - and his irritation at how institutions of taste manufacture sameness. The subtext is less moral outrage than aesthetic contempt: society’s problem isn’t only that it lies, but that it’s boringly well-made, repeating its poses like decorative tiles.