Quotes from Novalis

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

What delights, what pleasures does your life offer you that outweigh the raptures of death?

Mathematics is the Life of the Gods.

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

It is certain my belief gains quite infinitely the very moment I can convince another mind thereof

Where no gods are, spectres rule.

Life is the beginning of death. Life is for the sake of death. Death is at once the end and the beginning—at once separation and closer union of the self. Through death the reduction is complete.

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.

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

You are alone with everything you love.

A complete need should not exist... love, life in common with loved ones?

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

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.

We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.

One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand

Character is perfectly educated will.

Not only England, but every Englishman is an island.

A God-intoxicated man.

Philosophy ... bears witness to the deepest love of reflection, to absolute delight in wisdom.

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

The history of every individual man should be a Bible.

Man is a sun and his senses are the planets.

Man is lyrical, woman epic, marriage dramatic.