Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes

All great truths are simple in final analysis, and easily understood; if they are not, they are not great truths.

I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.

In every truth, the opposite is equally true. For example, a truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is onesided.

How much rationality and higher protection there is in such self-deception, and how much falseness I still require in order to allow myself again and again the luxury of my sincerity.

If the Way is made clear, it is not the Way.

There are two sorts of truth: trivialities, where opposites are clearly absurd, and profound truths, recognised by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth

Poetry dovetails contradictions.

Antithesis is the narrow gateway through which error most prefers to worm its way towards truth.

We often feel that a clever aphorism captures a truth that would require pages to defend in any other way.

The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.

All expression of truth does at length take this deep ethical form.

Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by.

As unnatural as dancing is, you have to find a natural way to do the unnatural.

It is a time of change,'' Sazed said. ''Perhaps it is also time to learn of other truths, other ways.

I may indeed very well happen to contradict myself; but truth, as Demades said, I do not contradict.

Art like life is an open secret.

Every expression of truth has in it the seeds of propagation, even as the sun cannot hide its light.

Only the truth and its expression can establish that new public opinion which will reform the ancient obsolete and pernicious order of life; and yet we not only do not express the truth we know, but often even distinctly give expression to what we ourselves regard as false. If only free men would not rely on that which has no power, and is always fettered upon external aids; but would trust in that which is always powerful and free the truth and its expression!

I read an interview with a Japanese freestyle jazz musician once, and he said something like, "Everything I'm going to tell you is not going to be true." He's not saying, "I'm trying to lie to you." But he's kind of saying that you can never say what something really is.

Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes.

It is not that there are no certainties, it is that it is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties.

Reality has always had too many heads.

In a myriad of ways you tell one truth.

Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.

Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand.