Top 100 Novalis Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Novalis

2. “Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”

— Novalis

3. “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.”

— Novalis

4. “There is but one temple in the world, and that is the body of man. Nothing is holier than this high form. Bending before men is a reverence done to this revelation in the flesh. We touch heaven when we lay our hand on a human body.”

— Novalis

5. “Where are we really going? Always home.”

— Novalis

6. “Every disease is a musical problem. Its cure a musical solution. The more rapid and complete the solution, the greater the musical talent of the doctor.”

— Novalis

7. “Hypotheses are nets: only he who casts will catch.”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

Featured in: Meaning of Life Quotes

10. “We are more closely connected to the invisible than to the visible.”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

12. “The poem of the understanding is philosophy.”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

14. “We touch heaven when we lay our hand on a human body!”

— Novalis

15. “The world must become romanticized, and in that way we find again its original meaning for us.”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

17. “Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution.”

— Novalis

18. “Love works magic. It is the finalpurpose of the world story, the Amen of the universe.”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

20. “Perceptibility is a kind of attentiveness.”

— Novalis

21. “Man is lyrical, woman epic, marriage dramatic.”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

23. “The highest purpose of intellectual cultivation is to give a man a perfect knowledge and mastery of his own inner self.”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

25. “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.”

— Novalis

26. “You are alone with everything you love.”

— Novalis

27. “The badge of honesty is simplicity.”

— Novalis

28. “Many things are too delicate to be thought; many more, to be spoken.”

— Novalis

29. “Der wahre Leser muss der erweiterte Autor sein.”

— Novalis

30. “We are on a mission: we are called to the cultivation of the earth .”

— Novalis

31. “Only as far as a man is happily married to himself is he fit for married life and family life in general.”

— Novalis

32. “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.”

— Novalis

33. “The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented. Fragments of this nature are literary seeds. There may be many an infertile grain among them: nevertheless, if only some come up!”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

36. “Building worlds is not enough for the deeper urging mind; but a loving heart sates the striving spirit.”

— Novalis

37. “Not only England, but every Englishman is an island.”

— Novalis

38. “The mysterious path goes inward. It is in us, and not anywhere else, where the eternity of the worlds, the past and the future are found.”

— Novalis

39. “Fate and temperament are the names of a concept.”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

41. “I was still blind, but twinkling stars did dance Throughout my being’s limitless expanse, Nothing had yet drawn close, only at distant stages I found myself, a mere suggestion sensed in past and future ages.”

— Novalis

42. “The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap.”

— Novalis

43. “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.”

— Novalis

44. “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.”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

46. “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.”

— Novalis

47. “Man is a sun, his senses are the planets.”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

50. “Prayer is to religion what thinking is to philosophy. To pray is to make religion.”

— Novalis