Novalis
Novalis
Novaliswas the pseudonym of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, a poet, author, and philosopher of Early German Romanticism. Hardenberg's professional work and university background, namely his study of mineralogy and management of salt mines in Saxony, was often ignored by his contemporary readers. The first studies showing important relations between his literary and professional works started in the 1960s...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth2 May 1772
CityWiederstedt, Germany
CountryGermany
sympathy soul unions
The individual soul should seek for an intimate union with the soul of the universe.
pain soul mind
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.
soul world seats
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.
soul cheerful wit
In cheerful souls there is no wit. Wit shows a disturbance of the equipoise.
world agility speak
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.
lying men ideas
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.
men solitude growth
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.
way world originals
The world must become romanticized, and in that way we find again its original meaning for us.
philosophy waking kind
Doing philosophy is only a threefold or double kind of waking--being awake--consciousness.
self unions sake
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.
philosophy heart mean
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.
spring flower air
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.
self world unions
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.
dream light vision
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.