Quotes from Novalis

We are near waking when we dream we are dreaming.

Nature is a petrified magic city.

A God-intoxicated man. [Ger., Gott-trunkener Mensch.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

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

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

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.

Where are we really going? Always home.

The badge of honesty is simplicity.

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.

Prayer is to religion what thinking is to philosophy. To pray is to make religion.

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

Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise.

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

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

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.