Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling Quotes

“All life is founded upon something independent from itself.”

“All phenomena are correlated in one absolute and necessary law, from which they can all be deduced.”

“Far from it being true that man and his activity makes the world comprehensible, he is himself the most incomprehensible of all, and drives me relentlessly to the view of the accursedness of all being, a view manifested in so many painful signs in ancient and modern times. It is precisely man who drives me to the final despairing question: Why is there something? Why not nothing?”

“Following the eternal act of self-revelation, the world as we now behold it, is all rule, order and form; but the unruly lies ever in the depths as though it might again break through, and order and form nowhere appear to have been original, but it seems as though what had initially been unruly had been brought to order.

This is the incomprehensible basis of reality in things, the irreducible remainder which cannot be resolved into reason by the greatest exertion but always remains in the depths. Out of this which is unreasonable, reason in the true sense is born. Without this preceding gloom, creation would have no reality; darkness is its necessary heritage.”

“How is a history at all conceivable, if all that is arises for each from his consciousness alone, also all past history can arise for each from his consciousness alone?”

“Learn only in order that you yourself may create. Only this divine ability to create makes a true human being; without it one is simply a cleverly constructed machine.”

“Man has been placed on that summit where he contains within him the source of self-impulsion toward good and evil in equal measure; the nexus of the principles within him is not a bond of necessity but of freedom. He stands at the dividing line; whatever he chooses will be his act, but he cannot remain in indecision because God must necessarily reveal himself and because nothing at all in creation can remain ambiguous.”

“Man’s being is essentially his own deed.”

“Mastery is revealed in limitation.”

“Nature is supposed to be the visible spirit, and spirit the invisible nature. Here, then, in the absolute identity of the spirit within us and the nature outside us, the problem of how a nature outside us is possible must be resolved.”

“Nature is visible Spirit; Spirit is invisible Nature.”

“Nature opens its eyes in man and notices that it is there.”

“Not everything that happens is the object of history, for example, natural events owe their historical character when they receive it only to the influence they have had on the actions of men; but even less is that which happens according to a known rule, repeated periodically, or at all a success which can be calculated a priori, regarded as a historical object.”

“Nothing upsets the philosophical mind more than when he hears that from now on all philosophy is supposed to lie caught in the shackles of one system. Never has he felt greater than when he sees before him the infinitude of knowledge.

The entire dignity of his science consists in the fact that it will never be completed. In that moment in which he would believe to have completed his system, he would become unbearable to himself. He would, in that moment, cease to be a creator, and would instead descend to being an instrument of his creation.”

“One is almost tempted to say that the language itself is a mythology deprived of its vitality, a bloodless mythology so to speak, which has only preserved in a formal and abstract form what mythology contains in living and concrete form.”

“Only he who knows God is truly moral.”

“That which Dante saw written on the door of the inferno must be written in a different sense also at the entrance to philosophy: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

Those who look for true philosophy must be bereft of all hope, all desire, all longing. They must not wish for anything, not know anything, must feel completely bare and impoverished.”

“The "I think, I am", is, since Descartes, the basic mistake of all knowledge; thinking is not my thinking, and being is not my being, for everything is only of God or of the totality.”

“The failure to invest in civil justice is directly related to the increase in criminal disorder. The more people feel there is injustice the more it becomes part of their psyche.”

“The human brain is the highest bloom of the whole organic metamorphosis of the earth.”

“The past is known, the present is recognized, the future is divined.”

“The soul of all hatred is love, and in the most violent anger only the silence that has been attacked and irritated in its innermost center is revealed.”

“There is in every man a certain feeling that he has been what he is from all eternity, and by no means become such in time.”

“There is no greatness without a continual solicitation to madness which, while it must be overcome, must never be completely lacking. One might profit by classifying men in this respect. The one kind are those in whom there is no madness at all and are so-called men of intellect whose works and deeds are nothing but cold works and deeds of the intellect.

But where there is no madness, there is, to be sure, also no real, active, living intellect. For wherein is intellect to prove itself but in the conquest, mastery, and ordering of madness?”

“This is not the time to reawaken old oppositions, but rather to seek what lies above and beyond all opposition.”

“To achieve great things we must be self-confined. Mastery is revealed in limitation.”

“Without contradiction, there would be no life, no movement, no progress, a deadly slumber of all forces.”

“Dead matter has no external world – it is absolutely identical with its world.”

“Poison does not attack the body, but the body attacks the poison.”

“The fear of speculation, the ostensible rush from the theoretical to the practical, brings about the same shallowness in action that it does in knowledge. It is by studying a strictly theoretical philosophy that we become most acquainted with Ideas, and only Ideas provide action with vigour and ethical meaning.”