C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Schlegel
Authorship is, according to the spirit in which it is pursued, an infamy, a pastime, a day-labor, a handicraft, an art, a science, a virtue.
Formerly it was the fashion to preach the natural; now it is the ideal. People too often forget that these things are profoundly compatible; that in a beautiful work of imagination the natural should be ideal, and the ideal natural.
In strength of intellect he was a demigod; in profundity of view; a prophet; in all-seeing wisdom, a protecting spirit.
That which exists in nature is a something purely individual and particular. Art, on the contrary, is essentially destined to manifest the general.
The historian is a prophet looking backwards.
The thinker requires exactly the same light as the painter, clear, without direct sunshine, or blinding rejection, and, where possible, from above.
There is no more potent antidote to low sensuality than the adoration of the beautiful. All the higher arts of design are essentially chaste without respect to the object. They purify the thoughts as tragedy purifies the passions. Their accidental effects are not worth consideration,—there are souls to whom even a vestal is not holy.
What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loved. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting.