Novalis Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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#3. Play is experimenting with chance.

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#4. 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.

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#5. The most intimate community of all knowledge - the republic of learning is the high purpose of scholars.

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#6. Apparently, we go forward.

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#7. Knowledge is only one half. Faith is the other.

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

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#9. 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.

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

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#11. What is nature? An encyclopedic systematic index or plan of our spirit. Why should we be content with the mere catalogue of our treasures - let us examine them for ourselves - and work with them and use them in diverse ways.

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#12. We are close to waking when we dream that we are dreaming.

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#13. 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.

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#14. 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.

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#15. Philosophy is really homesickness: the urge to be at home everywhere.

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

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#17. We are near waking when we dream we are dreaming.

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#18. Character is perfectly educated will.

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#19. 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.

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#20. Our life is no dream, but it should and will perhaps become one.

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#21. 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.

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#22. 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.

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

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#24. Not only England, but every Englishman is an island.

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

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

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

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#28. Where no gods are, spectres rule.

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#29. Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.

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#30. The history of every individual man should be a Bible.

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

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

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

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#34. Perceptibility is a kind of attentiveness.

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

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

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#37. The process of history is combustion.

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

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#39. Learning is pleasurable but doing is the height of enjoyment.

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#40. Humanity is a comic role.

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#41. Holy sleep, do not so seldom bring happiness to the night's beloved in this earthly labour of the day.

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#42. Mathematics is the Life of the Gods.

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#43. Oh draw at my heart, love,
Draw till I'm gone,
That, fallen asleep, I
Still may love on.
I feel the flow of
Death's youth-giving flood
To balsam and ether
Transform my blood
I live all the daytime
In faith and in might
And in holy fire
I die every night.

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#44. 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.

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

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#46. Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

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#47. 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!

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#48. Character is a perfectly educated will.

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

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#50. All the chance events of our lives are materials from which we can make what we like. Whoever is rich in spirit makes much of his life. Every acquaintance, every incident would be for the thoroughly spiritual person - the first element in an endless series - the beginning of an endless novel.

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#51. But even more heavenly than the flashing
stars are those infinite eyes which the night opens within us, and which see further even than the palest of those
innumerable hosts.

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#52. 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.

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#53. 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.

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#54. Everything is seed.

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

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

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#57. 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.

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#58. A character is a completely fashioned will.

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#59. To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.

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#60. Man is a sun, his senses are the planets.

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#61. There are ideal series of events which run parallel with the real ones. They rarely coincide.

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#62. True anarchy is the generative element of religion. Out of the annihilation of all existing institutions she raises her glorious head, as the new foundress of the world.

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#63. 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.

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

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#65. Character is a wish for a perfect education.

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#66. Every individual is the center of a system of emanation.

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#67. 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.

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

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#69. Our body is a moulded river

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

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#71. Where children are, there is the golden age.

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

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#73. The more narrow-minded a system is the more it will please worldly-wise people. Thus the system of the materialists, the doctrine of Helvetius and also Locke has recieved the most acclaim amongst his class. Thus Kant even now will find more followers than Fichte.

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

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#75. I show that I have understood a writer only when I can act in his spirit, when, without constricting his individuality, I can translate him and change him in diverse ways.

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

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#77. Our life is no dream; but it ought to become one, and perhaps will.

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

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#79. Flight from the communal spirit is death!

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#80. Accident is simply unforeseen order.

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#81. 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.

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

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#83. How can a person have a sense of something if he does not have the germ of it within himself. What I am to understand must develop organically within me
and what I seem to learn is only nourishment
stimulation of the organism.

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#84. Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise.

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

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

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#87. Longing for Death
Down into the womb of the earth,
Out of the kingdom of light,
Anger, pain, and a savage blow
Signal the happy departure.

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

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

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#90. 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.

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