Top 100 Novalis Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature.”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

53. “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

54. “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

55. “Character is perfectly educated will.”

— Novalis

56. “Character and fate are two words for the same thing.”

— Novalis

57. “Nature is a petrified magic city.”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

59. “Where children are, there is the golden age.”

— Novalis

60. “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

61. “Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise.”

— Novalis

62. “We are near waking when we dream we are dreaming.”

— Novalis

63. “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

64. “Everywhere we seek the Absolute, and always we find only things.”

— Novalis

65. “Only the most perfect human being can design the most perfect philosophy.”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

67. “A certain degree of solitude seems necessary to the full growth and spread of the highest mind; and therefore must a very extensive intercourse with men stifle many a holy germ, and scare away the gods, who shun the restless tumult of noisy companies and the discussion of petty interests.”

— Novalis

68. “Every stage of education begins with childhood. That is why the most educated person on earth so much resembles a child.”

— Novalis

69. “If the world is a precipitation of human nature, so to speak, then the divine world is a sublimation of the same. Both occur in one act. No precipitation without sublimation. What goes lost there in agility, is won here.”

— Novalis

70. “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

71. “Friends, the soil is poor, we must sow seeds in plenty for us to garner even modest harvests .”

— Novalis

72. “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

73. “Play is experimenting with chance.”

— Novalis

74. “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.”

— Novalis

75. “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.”

— Novalis

76. “To philosophize means to make vivid.”

— Novalis

77. “Our bodies are molded rivers.”

— Novalis

78. “In cheerful souls there is no wit. Wit shows a disturbance of the equipoise.”

— Novalis

79. “All power appears only in transition. Permanent power is stuff.”

— Novalis

80. “Accident is simply unforeseen order.”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

82. “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.”

— Novalis

83. “One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand.”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

86. “Before abstraction everything is one, but one like chaos; after abstraction everything is united again, but this union is a free binding of autonomous, self-determined beings. Out of a mob a society has developed, chaos has been transformed into a manifold world.”

— Novalis

87. “The normal present connects the past and the future through limitation. Contiguity results, crystallization by means of solidification. There also exists, however, a spiritual present that identifies past and future through dissolution, and this mixture is the element, the atmosphere of the poet.”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

89. “The brains -the thinking organs- are the world producers -nature’s genitals.”

— Novalis

90. “Many books are longer than they seem. They have indeed no end. The boredom that they cause is truly absolute and infinite.”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

92. “Mathematics is the Life of the Gods.”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

94. “There is an energy which springs from sickness and debility: it has a more powerful effect than the real, but, sadly, expires in an even greater infirmity.”

— Novalis

95. “The history of every individual man should be a Bible.”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

97. “Ein Kommandowort bewegt Armeen; das Wort Freiheit Nationen.”

— Novalis

98. “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

99. “Humanity is a comic role.”

— Novalis

100. “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