Quotes About Novalis

#1. Novalis and Dostoyevsky, awaited me just as do the mother, or the wife, the children, maids, dogs and cats in the case of more sensible people.

Hermann Hesse

#2. 'Character, says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms - character is destiny'.

George Eliot

#3. I have found that fate is as liquid and elusive a word as love. Plato thought they were the same ... Novalis wrote that fate and soul are two names for the same principle.

Liz Greene

#4. The connection between romantic politics and aesthetics is plain in Schiller's and Novalis's concept of the aesthetic or poetic state.

Frederick C. Beiser

#5. Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

Novalis

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

Novalis

#7. Everything is seed.

Novalis

#8. 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

Novalis

#9. 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.

Novalis

#10. 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.

Novalis

#11. 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.

Novalis

#12. 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.

Novalis

#13. 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.

Novalis

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

Novalis

#15. Character is a perfectly educated will.

Novalis

#16. 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!

Novalis

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

Novalis

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

Novalis

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

Novalis

#20. 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.

Novalis

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

Novalis

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

Novalis

#23. 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.

Novalis

#24. One makes a great error if one believes there are 'ancients.' Only now is antiquity starting to arise. It arises in the eyes and soul of the artist.

Novalis

#25. Mathematics is the Life of the Gods.

Novalis

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

Novalis

#27. Humanity is a comic role.

Novalis

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

Novalis

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

Novalis

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

Novalis

#31. The poem of the understanding is philosophy.

Novalis

#32. 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.

Novalis

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

Novalis

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

Novalis

#35. Fate and temperament are the names of a concept.

Novalis

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

Novalis

#37. Our body is a moulded river

Novalis

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

Novalis

#39. 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.

Novalis

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

Novalis

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

Novalis

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

Novalis

#43. 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.

Novalis

#44. 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.

Novalis

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

Novalis

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

Novalis

#47. 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.

Novalis

#48. A character is a completely fashioned will.

Novalis

#49. 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.

Novalis

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

Novalis

#51. 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.

Novalis

#52. And now I awaken, for I am both yours and mine.

Novalis

#53. You are alone with everything you love.

Novalis

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

Novalis

#55. 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.

Novalis

#56. Character is perfectly educated will.

Novalis

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

Novalis

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

Novalis

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

Novalis

#60. 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.

Novalis

#61. 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.

Novalis

#62. To philosophize means to make vivid.

Novalis

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

Novalis

#64. 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.

Novalis

#65. 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.

Novalis

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

Novalis

#67. 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.

Novalis

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

Novalis

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

Novalis

#70. Apparently, we go forward.

Novalis

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

Novalis

#72. 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.

Novalis

#73. Play is experimenting with chance.

Novalis

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

Novalis

#75. Novels arise out of the shortcoings of history.

Novalis

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

Novalis

#77. Nature is a petrified magic city.

Novalis

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

Novalis

#79. Our bodies are molded rivers.

Novalis

#80. The process of history is combustion.

Novalis

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

Novalis

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

Novalis

#83. Perceptibility is a kind of attentiveness.

Novalis

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

Novalis

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

Novalis

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

Novalis

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

Novalis

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

Novalis

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

Novalis

#90. Where no gods are, spectres rule.

Novalis

#91. 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.

Novalis

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

Novalis

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

Novalis

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

Novalis

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

Novalis

#96. Hypotheses are nets: only he who casts will catch.

Novalis

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

Novalis

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

Novalis

#99. 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.

Novalis

#100. 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.

Novalis