Novalis Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Humanity is a comic role.

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

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

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

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

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

Fate and temperament are the names of a concept.

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

Play is experimenting with chance.

A character is a completely fashioned will.

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.

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

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

Nature is a petrified magic city.

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

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

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.

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

Mathematics is the Life of the Gods.

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

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

The poem of the understanding is philosophy.

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

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

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

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

Character is a wish for a perfect education.

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

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.

Hypotheses are nets: only he who casts will catch.

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

We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.

Character is a perfectly educated will.

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

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.

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.

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.

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

Novels arise out of the shortcoings of history.

Not only England but every Englishman is an island.

A God-intoxicated man.