Novalis Quotes

95 Sourced Quotes

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

Novalis
A character is a completely fashioned will.

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

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

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

Novalis
Hypotheses are nets; only he will catch who casts his net.

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

Novalis
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
What has passed with him since then he does not disclose to us. He tells us that we ourselves, led on by him and our own desire, will discover what has passed with him.

Novalis
Surely this voice meant our Teacher; for it is he that can collect the indications which lie scattered on all sides. A singular light kindles in his looks, when at length the high Rune lies before us, and he watches in our eyes whether the star has yet risen upon us, which is to make the Figure visible and intelligible.

Novalis
The first Man is the first Spirit-seer; all appears to him as Spirit. What are children, but first men? The fresh gaze of the Child is richer in significance than the forecasting of the most indubitable Seer.

Novalis
We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.

Novalis
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.

Novalis
Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.

Novalis
If our Bodily Life is a burning, our Spiritual Life is a being burnt, a Combustion (or, is precisely the inverse the case?); Death, therefore, perhaps a Change of Capacity.

Novalis
Many counterrevolutionary books have been written in favor of the Revolution. But Burke has written a revolutionary book against the Revolution.

Novalis
The waking man looks without fear at this offspring of his lawless Imagination; for he knows that they are but vain Spectres of his weakness.

Novalis
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
The spirit of Poesy is the morning light, which makes the Statue of Memnon sound.

Novalis
Moral Action is that great and only Experiment, in which all riddles of the most manifold appearances explain themselves.

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

Novalis
It depends only on the weakness of our organs and of our self-excitement (Selbstberuhrung), that we do not see ourselves in a Fairy-world. All Fabulous Tales (Mahrchen) are merely dreams of that home world, which is everywhere and nowhere. The higher powers in us, which one day as Genies, shall fulfil our will, are, for the present, Muses, which refresh us on our toilsome course with sweet remembrances.

Novalis
Nature is an Æolian Harp, a musical instrument; whose tones again are keys to higher strings in us.

Novalis
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