Top 114 Quotes & Sayings by Novalis

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

Where no gods are, spectres rule.

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

Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

A character is a completely fashioned will.

Knowledge is only one half. Faith is the other.

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

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

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

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

Learning is pleasurable but doing is the height of enjoyment.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

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

Nature is a petrified magic city.

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

We are near waking when we dream we are dreaming.

Character and fate are two words for the same thing.

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

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

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

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.

When one begins to reflect on philosophy—then philosophy seems to us to be everything, like God, and love. It is a mystical, highly potent, penetrating idea—which ceaselessly drives us inward in all directions. The decision to do philosophy—to seek philosophy is the act of self-liberation—the thrust toward ourselves.

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

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.

Man is lyrical, woman epic, marriage dramatic.

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.

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

Accident is simply unforeseen order.

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

Imagination places the future world for us either above or below or in reincarnation. 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.

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

You are alone with everything you love.

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.

Not only England, but every Englishman is an island.

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

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

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

Where are we really going? Always home.

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

Character and fate are two words for the same thing

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

The badge of honesty is simplicity.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Friendship, love, and piety ought to be handled with a sort of mysterious secrecy; they ought to be spoken of only in the rare moments of perfect confidence, to be mutually understood in silence. Many things are too delicate to be thought; many more, to be spoken.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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