Publication is to thinking as childbirth is to the first kiss.
Interpretation
This quote compares the act of sharing thoughts to the profound experience of childbirth, suggesting that true expression is a significant and transformative process.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel's quote draws a parallel between the act of publication, which allows thoughts to reach an audience, and childbirth, a profound and altering experience. Just as childbirth is a culmination of nurturing, love, and pain that leads to new life, publication represents a significant moment where one's thoughts are born into the world, marking a transition from inner contemplation to public engagement. Both processes involve vulnerability, creativity, and the hope of connection, underscoring that true expression requires not only effort but also the courage to share one's innermost ideas with others.
In practice
In a speech on the importance of sharing our ideas, one might say this quote to emphasize the value of publication.
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.
So we must lay it down that the association which is a state exists not for the purpose of living together but for the sake of noble actions.
I want to escape from myself. For when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable--indescribable--my misery amazing.
In vain do we seek tranquility in the desert; temptations are always with us; our passions, represented by the demons, never let us alone: those monsters created by the heart, those illusions produced by the mind, those vain specters that are our errors and our lies always appear before us to seduce us; they attack us even in our fasting or our mortifications, in other words, in our very strength.
Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state...
Men, forever tempted to lift the veil of the future-with the aid of computers or horoscopes or the intestines of sacrificial animals-have a worse record to show in these sciences than in almost any scientific endeavor.
Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.
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