Life & Wisdom Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Schlegel treats wit less like a party trick than a metaphysical event: imagination, in his view, doesn’t arrive as a tidy argument but as a visible spark. Calling wit “the appearance” and “external flash” of imagination is a Romantic move, and a slightly suspicious one. He’s saying the mind’s deepest power can’t be fully possessed or explained; it can only break the surface in sudden, stylized moments. Wit becomes the symptom of an interior force too large to render directly.

That’s why “divinity” enters so naturally. A flash is not the sun; it’s a sign that something immense is there. Schlegel’s subtext is that the most profound truths in art and thought are registered indirectly, through form, surprise, compression. Wit isn’t the opposite of seriousness; it’s seriousness traveling incognito, smuggling the infinite into a finite line.

The provocative hinge is his pairing of wit with mysticism. Mysticism is often imagined as solemn, wordless, anti-intellectual. Schlegel flips it: mysticism has a “witty character” because both depend on leaps, not steps. They court the unsayable, and they do it by creating an effect - a shimmer of meaning that feels bigger than its language. In early German Romantic circles (the Jena set), this was a program: irony, fragment, aphorism as the modern forms capable of gesturing toward the absolute without pretending to capture it. Wit, for Schlegel, is the secular technique that mimics religious revelation: brief, blinding, and maddeningly incomplete.