Quotes from Novalis

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

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.

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

Where are we really going? Always home.

In a work of art, chaos must shimmer through the veil of order.

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

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.

Philosophy is really homesickness: the urge to be at home everywhere.

Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution.

We are close to waking when we dream that we are dreaming.

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.

Our life is no dream, but it should and will perhaps become one.

Knowledge is only one half. Faith is the other.

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

Oh draw at my heart, love, Draw till I'm gone, That, fallen asleep, I Still may love on. I feel the flow of Death's youth-giving flood To balsam and ether Transform my blood -- I live all the daytime In faith and in might And in holy fire I die every night.

We dream of travels throughout the universe: is not the universe within us? We do not know the depths of our spirit. The mysterious path leads within. In us, or nowhere, lies eternity with its worlds, the past and the future.

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

Play is experimenting with chance.

And now I awaken, for I am both yours and mine.

The world must be romanticized. Only in that way will one rediscover its original senses. Romanticization is nothing less than a qualitative raising of the power of a thing . . . I romanticize something when I give the commonplace a higher meaning, the known the dignity of the unknown, and the finite the appearance of the infinite.

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 nourishment--stimulation of the organism.

Every individual is the center of a system of emanation.

To philosophize means to make vivid.

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