Novalis
Philosophy ... bears witness to the deepest love of reflection, to absolute delight in wisdom.Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Powerful
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.Collection: Mean
Prayer is to religion what thinking is to philosophy. To pray is to make religion.Collection: Prayer
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.Collection: Self
Perceptibility is a kind of attentiveness.Collection: Kind
The history of every individual man should be a Bible.Collection: Men
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!Collection: Art
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.Collection: Self
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.Collection: World
Tools arm the man. One can well say that man is capable of bringing forth a world; he lacks only the necessary apparatus, the corresponding armature of his sensory tools. The beginning is there. Thus the principle of a warship lies in the idea of the shipbuilder, who is able to incorporate this thought by making himself into a gigantic machine, as it were, through a mass of men and appropriate tools and materials. Thus the idea of a moment often required monstrous organs, monstrous masses of materials, and man is therefore a potential, if not an actual creator.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Dream
One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understandCollection: Doe
It is certain my belief gains quite infinitely the very moment I can convince another mind thereofCollection: Sympathy
Mathematics is the Life of the Gods.Collection: Life
Friends, the soil is poor, we must sow seeds in plenty for us to garner even modest harvests.Collection: Soil
The artist stands on the human being as a statue does on a pedestal.Collection: Artist
Fate and temperament are the names of a concept.Collection: Fate
Character is a perfectly educated will.Collection: Character
The world must become romanticized, and in that way we find again its original meaning for us.Collection: World
Blood will stream over Europe until the nations become aware of the frightful madness which drives them in circles. And then, struck by celestial music and made gentle, they approach their former altars all together, hear about the works of peace, and hold a great celebration of peace with fervent tears before the smoking altars.Collection: Blood
Only the most perfect human being can design the most perfect philosophy.Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Powerful
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.Collection: Soul
The individual soul should seek for an intimate union with the soul of the universe.Collection: Sympathy
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.Collection: Men
Denotation by means of sounds and markings is a remarkable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me; several lines a million things. How easy becomes the manipulation of the universe here, how evident the concentration of the intellectual world! Language is the dynamics of the spiritual realm. One word of command moves armies; the word liberty entire nations.Collection: God
To know a truth well, one must have fought it out.Collection: Positive
The highest purpose of intellectual cultivation is to give a man a perfect knowledge and mastery of his own inner self.Collection: Knowledge
The badge of honesty is simplicity.Collection: Honesty
When one begins to reflect on philosophy—then philosophy seems to us to be everything, like God, and love. It is a mystical, highly potent, penetrating idea—which ceaselessly drives us inward in all directions. The decision to do philosophy—to seek philosophy is the act of self-liberation—the thrust toward ourselves.Collection: Philosophy
Character and fate are two words for the same thingCollection: Character
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.Collection: Lying
To get to know a truth properly, one must polemicize it.Collection: Knows
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.Collection: Block
Many things are too delicate to be thought; many more, to be spoken.Collection: Delicacy
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.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Eye
Not only England, but every Englishman is an island.Collection: Islands
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.Collection: Bible
We touch heaven when we lay our hand on a human body!Collection: Hands
Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution.Collection: Music
To philosophize means to make vivid.Collection: Mean
Morality must be the heart of our existence, if it is to be what it wants to be for us. The highest form of philosophy is ethics. Thus all philosophy begins with "I am." The highest statement of cognition must be an expression of that fact which is the means and ground for all cognition, namely, the goal of the I.Collection: Philosophy
Everywhere we seek the Absolute, and always we find only things.Collection: Absolutes
Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.Collection: Genius