The highest task of education is – to take command of one’s transcendental self – to be at once the I of its I. It is all the less to be wondered at that we lack complete insight and understanding for others. Without perfect self-understanding one will never learn to truly understand others.

— Novalis

Novalis Quotes

Nature is a petrified magic city.

— Novalis

Hypotheses are nets: only he who casts will catch.

— Novalis

Not only England, but every Englishman is an island.

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

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.

— Novalis

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

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

— Novalis

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.

— Novalis

Up to now our thinking was either purely mechanical – discursive – atomistic – or purely intuitive – dynamic. Perhaps now the time for union has come?

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

There is more truth in their romances than in learned chronicles.

— Novalis

Though the heroes and their fates are inventions, yet the spirit in which they are composed is true and natural.

— Novalis

The greatest of sorcerers would be the one who would cast a spell on himself to the degree of taking his own phantasmagoria for autonomous apparitions. Might that not be our case?

— Novalis

Centripetal force is the synthetic striving of the spirit – centrifugal force the analytical striving of the spirit. Striving toward unity – striving towards diversity. Through the mutual determination of each by the other – that higher synthesis of unity and diversity itself will be produced – whereby one is in all and all in one.

— Novalis

Der wahre Leser muss der erweiterte Autor sein.

— Novalis

Ein Kommandowort bewegt Armeen; das Wort Freiheit Nationen.

— Novalis

Inspiration without intellect is useless and dangerous; and the poet will be able to perform few wonders, when he is astonished by wonders.

— Novalis

The ideal of morality has no more dangerous rival than the ideal of supreme strength, of a life of maximum vigor, which has also been called the ideal of aesthetic greatness. That life is in truth the ultimate attainment of the barbarian, and unfortunately in these days of civilization’s withering it has won a great many adherents. In pursuance of this ideal man becomes a hybrid thing, a brute-spirit, whose cruel mentality exerts a horrible spell upon weaklings.

— Novalis

Who does not love to wander at twilight, when the light of day and the deep shades of night mingle together in deep coloring?

— Novalis
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