Novalis Quotations

Learning is pleasurable but doing is the height of enjoyment.

I often feel, and ever more deeply I realize, that fate and character are the same conception.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

A hero is one who knows how to hang on one minute longer.

Knowledge is only one half. Faith is the other.

We are near waking when we dream we are dreaming.

We are more closely connected to the invisible than to the visible.

Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise.

To become properly acquainted with a truth, we must first have disbelieved it, and disputed against it.

Christianity is the root of all democracy, the highest fact in the rights of men.

Character and fate are two words for the same thing

Only as far as a man is happily married to himself is he fit for married life and family life in general.

Philosophy is properly home-sickness; the wish to be everywhere at home.

Nothing is more indispensable to true religiosity than a mediator that links us with divinity.

The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

We never completely comprehend ourselves, but we can do far more than comprehend.

If the world is a precipitation of human nature, so to speak, then the divine world is a sublimation of the same. Both occur in one act. No precipitation without sublimation. What goes lost there in agility, is won here.

Tools arm the man. One can well say that man is capable of bringing forth a world; he lacks only the necessary apparatus, the corresponding armature of his sensory tools. The beginning is there. Thus the principle of a warship lies in the idea of the shipbuilder, who is able to incorporate this thought by making himself into a gigantic machine, as it were, through a mass of men and appropriate tools and materials. Thus the idea of a moment often required monstrous organs, monstrous masses of materials, and man is therefore a potential, if not an actual creator.

A certain degree of solitude seems necessary to the full growth and spread of the highest mind; and therefore must a very extensive intercourse with men stifle many a holy germ, and scare away the gods, who shun the restless tumult of noisy companies and the discussion of petty interests.

The world must become romanticized, and in that way we find again its original meaning for us.

Doing philosophy is only a threefold or double kind of waking--being awake--consciousness.

Life is the beginning of death. Life is for the sake of death. Death is at once the end and the beginning—at once separation and closer union of the self. Through death the reduction is complete.

Morality must be the heart of our existence, if it is to be what it wants to be for us. ... The highest form of philosophy is ethics. Thus all philosophy begins with "I am." The highest statement of cognition must be an expression of that fact which is the means and ground for all cognition, namely, the goal of the I.

It is not merely the multiplicity of tints, the gladness of tone, or the balminess of the air which delight in the spring; it is the still consecrated spirit of hope, the prophecy of happy days yet to come; the endless variety of nature, with presentiments of eternal flowers which never shall fade, and sympathy with the blessedness of the ever-developing world.

Before abstraction everything is one, but one like chaos; after abstraction everything is united again, but this union is a free binding of autonomous, self-determined beings. Out of a mob a society has developed, chaos has been transformed into a manifold world.

Darwin remarks that we are less dazzled by the light at waking, if we have been dreaming of visible objects. Happy are those who have here dreamt of a higher vision! They will the sooner be able to endure the glories of the world to come.

Denotation by means of sounds and markings is a remarkable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me; several lines a million things. How easy becomes the manipulation of the universe here, how evident the concentration of the intellectual world! Language is the dynamics of the spiritual realm. One word of command moves armies; the word liberty entire nations.

The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented. Fragments of this nature are literary seeds. There may be many an infertile grain among them: nevertheless, if only some come up!

I was still blind , but twinkling stars did dance Throughout my being's limitless expanse, Nothing had yet drawn close, only at distant stages I found myself, a mere suggestion sensed in past and future ages.

Blood will stream over Europe until the nations become aware of the frightful madness which drives them in circles. And then, struck by celestial music and made gentle, they approach their former altars all together, hear about the works of peace, and hold a great celebration of peace with fervent tears before the smoking altars.

The world must be romanticized. In this way the originary meaning may be found again.

A God-intoxicated man. [Ger., Gott-trunkener Mensch.]

It is certain my belief gains quite infinitely the very moment I can convince another mind thereof

How do we see physically? No differently that we do in our consciousness - by means of the productive power of imagination. Consciousness is the eye and ear, the sense for inner and outer meaning.

Character is a perfectly educated will.

The brains -the thinking organs- are the world producers -nature's genitals.

Hypotheses are nets: only he who casts will catch.

The artist stands on the human being as a statue does on a pedestal.

Nature is a petrified magic city.

Many things are too delicate to be thought; many more, to be spoken.

Philosophy is really nostalgia, the desire to be at home.

Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution.

Character is perfectly educated will.

Imagination places the future world for us either above or below or in reincarnation. We dream of travels throughout the universe: is not the universe within us? We do not know the depths of our spirit. The mysterious path leads within. In us, or nowhere, lies eternity with its worlds, the past and the future.

Building worlds is not enough for the deeper urging mind; but a loving heart sates the striving spirit.

A complete need should not exist... love, life in common with loved ones?

To know a truth well, one must have fought it out.

In a work of art, chaos must shimmer through the veil of order.

Every disease is a musical problem. Its cure a musical solution. The more rapid and complete the solution, the greater the musical talent of the doctor.

Our bodies are molded rivers.

The best thing about the sciences is their philosophical ingredient, like life for an organic body. If one dephilosophizes the sciences, what remains left? Earth , air , and [[water.

When one begins to reflect on philosophy—then philosophy seems to us to be everything, like God, and love. It is a mystical, highly potent, penetrating idea—which ceaselessly drives us inward in all directions. The decision to do philosophy—to seek philosophy is the act of self-liberation—the thrust toward ourselves.

Man has his being in truth--if he sacrifices truth he sacrifices himself. Whoever betrays truth betrays himself. It is not a question of lying--but of acting against one's conviction.

The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature.

The ideal of morality has no more dangerous rival than the ideal of highest strength, of most powerful life. It is the maximum of the savage.

Love works magic. It is the finalpurpose of the world story, the Amen of the universe.

Character is a wish for a perfect education.

We are on a mission: we are called to the cultivation of the earth .

One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand

Most observers of the French Revolution, especially the clever and noble ones, have explained it as a life-threatening and contagious illness. They have remained standing with the symptoms and have interpreted these in manifold and contrary ways. Some have regarded it as a merely local ill. The most ingenious opponents have pressed for castration. They well noticed that this alleged illness is nothing other than the crisis of beginning puberty.

Everywhere we seek the Absolute, and always we find only things.

The highest purpose of intellectual cultivation is to give a man a perfect knowledge and mastery of his own inner self.

Humanity is the higher meaning of our planet, the nerve that connects this part of it with the upper world, the eye it raises to heaven.

The individual soul should seek for an intimate union with the soul of the universe.

To get to know a truth properly, one must polemicize it.

Play is experimenting with chance.

Mathematics is the Life of the Gods.

Not only England, but every Englishman is an island.

Friends , the soil is poor, we must sow seeds in plenty for us to garner even modest harvests .

Philosophy can bake no bread; but she can procure for us God , Freedom , Immortality. Which, then, is more practical, Philosophy or Economy ?

Man is lyrical, woman epic, marriage dramatic.

Prayer is to religion what thinking is to philosophy. To pray is to make religion.

To philosophize means to make vivid.

Accident is simply unforeseen order.

The mysterious path goes inward. It is in us, and not anywhere else, where the eternity of the worlds, the past and the future are found.

Sometimes with the most intense pain a paralysis of sensibility occurs. The soul disintegrates--hence the deadly frost--the free power of the mind--the shattering, ceaseless wit of this kind of despair. There is no inclination for anything any more--the person is alone, like a baleful power--as he has no connection with the rest of the world he consumes himself gradually--and in accordance with his own principle he is--misanthropic and misotheos.

One should, when overwhelmed by the shadow of a giant, move aside and see if the colossal shadow isn't merely that of a pygmy blocking out the sun.

There is but one temple in the world, and that is the body of man. Nothing is holier than this high form. Bending before men is a reverence done to this revelation in the flesh. We touch heaven when we lay our hand on a human body.

All the events of our life are materials of which we can make what we will.

What delights, what pleasures does your life offer you that outweigh the raptures of death?

Man is a sun, his senses are the planets.

You are alone with everything you love.

When you understand how to love one thing, then you also understand how to love everything.

Only the most perfect human being can design the most perfect philosophy.

All power appears only in transition. Permanent power is stuff.

Fate and temperament are the names of a concept.

Many books are longer than they seem. They have indeed no end. The boredom that they cause is truly absolute and infinite.

We touch heaven when we lay our hand on a human body!

Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.

There is an energy which springs from sickness and debility: it has a more powerful effect than the real, but, sadly, expires in an even greater infirmity.

Every stage of education begins with childhood. That is why the most educated person on earth so much resembles a child.

Perceptibility is a kind of attentiveness.

Philosophy ... bears witness to the deepest love of reflection, to absolute delight in wisdom.

A character is a completely fashioned will.

The history of every individual man should be a Bible.

The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap.

Humanity is a comic role.

The normal present connects the past and the future through limitation. Contiguity results, crystallization by means of solidification. There also exists, however, a spiritual present that identifies past and future through dissolution, and this mixture is the element, the atmosphere of the poet.

The badge of honesty is simplicity.