Novalis Quotes

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

Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.

Learning is pleasurable but doing is the height of enjoyment.

Where are we really going? Always home.

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

There is but one temple in the universe, and that is the body of man.

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.

In cheerful souls there is no wit. Wit shows a disturbance of the equipoise.

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

Nature is an aeolian harp, a musical instrument whose tones are the re-echo of higher strings within us.

Character and fate are two words for the same thing

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

Love is the final end of the world's history, the Amen of the universe.

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.

Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise.

Everything at a distance turns into poetry; distant mountains, distant people, distant events; all become Romantic.

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

The Bible begins gloriously with Paradise, the symbol of youth, and ends with the everlasting kingdom, with the holy city. The history of every man should be a Bible.

The badge of honesty is simplicity.

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

Accident is simply unforeseen order.

The history of every individual man should be a Bible.

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

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.

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

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

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

Not only England, but every Englishman is an island.

You are alone with everything you love.

Man is a sun and his senses are the planets.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Man is lyrical, woman epic, marriage dramatic.

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.

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

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

Knowledge is only one half. Faith is the other.

Character is perfectly educated will.

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

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.

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

Our bodies are molded rivers.

We are near waking when we dream we are dreaming.

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

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

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

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

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

To philosophize means to make vivid.

Perceptibility is a kind of attentiveness.

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.