Top 100 Novalis Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “To get to know a truth properly, one must polemicize it.”

— Novalis

52. “Inspiration without intellect is useless and dangerous; and the poet will be able to perform few wonders, when he is astonished by wonders.”

— Novalis

53. “Darwin remarks that we are less dazzled by the light at waking, if we have been dreaming of visible objects. Happy are those who have here dreamt of a higher vision! They will the sooner be able to endure the glories of the world to come.”

— Novalis

54. “The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature.”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

56. “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

57. “Character is perfectly educated will.”

— Novalis

58. “Nature is a petrified magic city.”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

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

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

— Novalis

64. “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

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

— Novalis

66. “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

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

— Novalis

68. “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

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

— Novalis

70. “Play is experimenting with chance.”

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

72. “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

73. “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

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. “Our bodies are molded rivers.”

— Novalis

77. “To philosophize means to make vivid.”

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

— Novalis

81. “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

82. “Accident is simply unforeseen order.”

— Novalis

83. “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

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

— Novalis

85. “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

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

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

92. “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

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

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

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

— Novalis

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

— 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