“Character and fate are two words for the same thing.”
— Novalis
“Character is perfectly educated will.”
“Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise.”
“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.”
“I often feel, and ever more deeply I realize, that fate and character are the same conception.”
“To philosophize means to make vivid.”
“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.”
“Where children are, there is the golden age.”
“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.”
“Our bodies are molded rivers.”
“Every stage of education begins with childhood. That is why the most educated person on earth so much resembles a child.”
“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.”
“Everywhere we seek the Absolute, and always we find only things.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We are near waking when we dream we are dreaming.”
“The individual soul should seek for an intimate union with the soul of the universe.”
“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.”
“In cheerful souls there is no wit. Wit shows a disturbance of the equipoise.”
“Play is experimenting with chance.”
“There is but one temple in the universe, and that is the body of man.”
“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.”
“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.”
“All power appears only in transition. Permanent power is stuff.”
“Friends, the soil is poor, we must sow seeds in plenty for us to garner even modest harvests .”
“Accident is simply unforeseen order.”
“One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand.”
“When you understand how to love one thing, then you also understand how to love everything.”
“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.”
“Mathematics is the Life of the Gods.”
“Only the most perfect human being can design the most perfect philosophy.”
“The brains -the thinking organs- are the world producers -nature’s genitals.”
“Nothing is more indispensable to true religiosity than a mediator that links us with divinity.”
“Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.”
“All the events of our life are materials of which we can make what we will.”
“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.”
“The artist stands on the human being as a statue does on a pedestal.”
“Many books are longer than they seem. They have indeed no end. The boredom that they cause is truly absolute and infinite.”
“Humanity is a comic role.”
“The history of every individual man should be a Bible.”
“Our life is no dream, but it should and will perhaps become one.”
“Inspiration without intellect is useless and dangerous; and the poet will be able to perform few wonders, when he is astonished by wonders.”
“Though the heroes and their fates are inventions, yet the spirit in which they are composed is true and natural.”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Up to now our thinking was either purely mechanical – discursive – atomistic – or purely intuitive – dynamic. Perhaps now the time for union has come?”
“Der wahre Leser muss der erweiterte Autor sein.”
We're on a mission of turning inspiring quotes into beautiful wallpapers. Start your week with a motivational kick. Don't miss out on our next weekly batch.
Join 48,000+ other people and subscribe to Quotefancy Weekly Digest.
