Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.
Interpretation
Irony highlights the coexistence of opposites, illustrating the complexity of truth.
This quote by Schlegel suggests that irony serves as a manifestation of paradox, where two seemingly contradictory ideas can coexist and reveal deeper truths about life. Paradoxes compel us to think more critically about situations, highlighting the richness and complexity of experiences that can be both good and great simultaneously.
In practice
This quote can be used in a philosophical discussion about the nature of truth.
Prudishness is pretense of innocence without innocence. Women have to remain prudish as long as men are sentimental, dense, and evil enough to demand of them eternal innocence and lack of education. For innocence is the only thing which can ennoble lack of education.
A classical work doesn't ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it.
If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.
He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.
Religion can emerge in all forms of feeling: here wild anger, there the sweetest pain; here consuming hatred, there the childlike smile of serene humility.
A priest is he who lives solely in the realm of the invisible, for whom all that is visible has only the truth of an allegory.
Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.
Pride and curiosity are the two scourges of our souls. The latter prompts us to poke our noses into everything, and the former forbids us to leave anything unresolved and undecided.
We have contingency plans for war, but none for peace.
A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of monopoly in the means of production.
Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust? And, live we how we can, yet die we must.
The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
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