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.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich SchlegelRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques the societal expectation for women to maintain an innocent facade despite the ignorance and malice of men.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel's quote highlights the hypocrisy surrounding gender expectations, particularly the pressure on women to embody innocence while being denied education and agency. It suggests that this notion of innocence is a performance required by society, rooted in the demands and sentiments of men, who remain ignorant or maliciously indifferent, thus perpetuating a cycle of ignorance for women.
Themes
InnocenceEducationGenderSocietyHypocrisy
In practice
Example use cases
During a panel discussion on gender roles, I might quote Schlegel to illustrate the outdated expectations placed on women.
More from Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
All quotes →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.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich SchlegelRead
He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich SchlegelRead
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.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich SchlegelRead
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.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich SchlegelRead
Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich SchlegelRead
Similar quotes
People of different religions and cultures live side by side in almost every part of the world, and most of us have overlapping identities which unite us with very different groups. We can love what we are, without hating what – and who – we are not. We can thrive in our own tradition, even as we learn from others, and come to respect their teachings.
Kofi AnnanRead
A man is an angel that has gone deranged.
Philip K. DickRead
We admit of no government by divine right, believing that so far as power is concerned the Beneficent Creator has made no distinction amongst men; that all are upon an equality, and that the only legitimate right to govern is an express grant of power from the governed.
William Henry HarrisonRead
The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded. It is a doctrine alike of the oldest and of the newest philosophy, that man is one, and that you cannot injure any member, without a sympathetic injury to all the members
Ralph Waldo EmersonRead
While under precapitalistic conditions superior men were the masters on whom the masses of the inferior had to attend, under capitalism the more gifted and more able have no means to profit from their superiority other than to serve to the best of their abilities the wishes of the majority of the less gifted.
Ludwig Von MisesRead
And for me anyway, consciousness is three components: a personal component which for lack of a better word we can call the soul. A collective component which is more archetypal and a deeper level, and then a universal domain of consciousness.
Deepak ChopraRead