Magnificent Rebels Quotes

“By giving art a leading role, Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism became the philosophical underpinning of Romanticism.”
― Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

“the young Romantics began to feel a deep sense of connection to the world around them. They wanted to see the world through the lens of their own selves. Instead of just visiting museums and cities, this new generation scrambled into caves, slept in forests and hiked up mountains to be in nature. They wanted to feel rather than observe what they were seeing. They wanted to discover themselves in nature and ‘to be one with everything living’,”
― Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

“Coleridge’s writings introduced the Jena Set to English readers but some thirty years later also to American thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose own philosophy would become infused with the ideas of ‘this admirable Schelling’, as he called him. Inspired, many of the American Transcendentalists then set out to learn German so that they too could read the Jena Set’s works in the original and learn about ‘this strange genial poetic comprehensive philosophy’, as Emerson described it. Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, the Transcendentalists insisted, were the ‘great thinkers of the world’, and as important as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and Leibniz.”
― Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

“Today the English-speaking world celebrates the Jena Set’s contemporaries, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, William Blake and the younger generation of Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, as the great Romantic poets. They were all of that and more, but they were not alone and they were not the first. It was the Jena Set who first proclaimed these ideas, and over the ensuing decades the effects rippled out into the world. So enthralled was Coleridge by their ideas that he travelled to Germany in 1798, determined to learn German and to meet his heroes in Jena. ‘Speak nothing but German. Live with Germans. Read in German. Think in German”
― Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

“Set resemble other influential groups: the North American Transcendentalists, for instance, comprising Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and others, who lived in Concord, Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century; similarly, the Bloomsbury Set that coalesced in early twentieth-century London and included Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Vanessa Bell and John Maynard Keynes; or the modernist circle of Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1920s Paris.”
― Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

“Las ideas del Círculo de Jena se expandieron desde la pequeña ciudad del ducado de Sajonia-Weimar por el resto del mundo. Su énfasis en la experiencia individual, su descripción de la naturaleza como un organismo vivo, su rechazo a las reglas rigurosas en la poesía y su insistencia en que el arte era el vínculo unificador entre la mente y el mundo exterior se convirtieron en temas populares en las obras de artistas, escritores, poetas y músicos de toda Europa y Estados Unidos. Y en el centro del romanticismo estaba su concepto de la unidad del hombre y la naturaleza.”
― Andrea Wulf, Magníficos rebeldes: Los primeros románticos y la invención del yo

“«Los franceses solo son todopoderosos en masa», mientras que los alemanes celebraban la autodeterminación y el librepensamiento. Francia debería aprender de Alemania, «la tierra natal del pensamiento», les decía a los lectores.”
― Andrea Wulf, Magníficos rebeldes: Los primeros románticos y la invención del yo

“«Tomé y utilicé todo lo que se presentó ante mis ojos, mis oídos y mis sentidos. Miles de personas contribuyeron a la creación de mis obras: sabios y locos, intelectuales e idiotas, niños, hombres en la flor de la vida y ancianos... A menudo coseché lo que otros habían sembrado. La obra de mi vida es la de un colectivo».[1427]”
― Andrea Wulf, Magníficos rebeldes: Los primeros románticos y la invención del yo

“centro”
― Andrea Wulf, Magníficos rebeldes: Los primeros románticos y la invención del yo

“Let the wealthy step aside, and the poor rule the world.”
― Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

“We live in a world in which we tiptoe along a thin line between free will and selfishness, between self-determanation and narcissism, between empathy and righteousness.”
― Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

“Novels were still seen as an inferior literary form. Some thought them shallow and sentimental, worrying that women in particular were in danger of being seduced to irrationality or even immorality. Others believed that libraries which stocked them were harmful to society. Novels evoked a dream world so removed from reality, one critic warned, that young people risked being drawn to dangerously idealistic and revolutionary ideas.”
― Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

“The most wonderful phenomenon, the eternal fact, is our own existence,’ Novalis wrote in 1797. Life’s most important task was to grasp the self because ‘without perfect self-understanding we will never learn truly to understand others’. Let”
― Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

“Fichte had become interested in what he called the ‘national self’. Until France’s decisive victory, the Ich-experience had been the lens through which the friends in Jena had experienced reality. Now, Fichte also paved the way for a bigger Ich – the Ich of a nation. This was a dangerous idea, and one that would be exploited in Germany in the future.”
― Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

“they embraced spirituality as part of the greater romantic project. Their new interest was about injecting feelings, imagination and beauty into an increasingly materialistic world. This was not a search for God but a search for themselves as part of the universe.”
― Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

“Schelling said, art was so much more. Because we’re part of nature, an artwork produced by us is actually a reflection of nature.”
― Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

“Schelling’s Naturphilosophie had opened a door to a world in which everything – from gravity, magnetism and light to plants, animals and humans – was connected.”
― Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

“Goethe had always believed that the process of gaining knowledge – Erkenntnis[*1] – came through direct observation. Most idealists, including Fichte, rejected this idea and insisted that all knowledge of reality originated in the mind. But not Schelling. He was an idealist who believed that ‘absolutely all of our knowledge originates in experience’.”
― Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

“Kant had claimed that a woman’s only purpose was the ‘preservation of the species’ and to entertain her husband.”
― Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

“As Schelling put it: ‘Mind is invisible nature, while nature is visible mind.”
― Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

“Where Fichte’s Ich was shaped by its opposition to the non-Ich, Schelling believed that the self and nature were identical.”
― Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

“Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel disagreed with Fichte, because for them philosophy was a never-ending process of thinking about thinking itself. It was an infinite reflection upon self-reflection.”
― Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self