Quotes by Novalis

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

“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 des...”

“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”

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

“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 nourishmen...”

“Humanity is a comic role. ”

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

“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. ”

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

“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.”

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

“The true reader must be an extension of the author. He is the higher court that receives the case already prepared by the lower court. The feeling by means of which the author has separated out the...”

“Almost all genius up to now was one-sidedthe result of a sickly constitution. One type had too much sense of the external, the other too much inner sense. Seldom could nature achieve a balance betw...”

“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 h...”

“Nature is a petrified magic city.”

“Learning is pleasurable but doing is the height of enjoyment.”

“Knowledge is only one half. Faith is the other.”

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

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

“Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.”