Novalis
Novalis
Novaliswas the pseudonym of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, a poet, author, and philosopher of Early German Romanticism. Hardenberg's professional work and university background, namely his study of mineralogy and management of salt mines in Saxony, was often ignored by his contemporary readers. The first studies showing important relations between his literary and professional works started in the 1960s...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth2 May 1772
CityWiederstedt, Germany
CountryGermany
Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution.
Most observers of the French Revolution, especially the clever and noble ones, have explained it as a life-threatening and contagious illness. They have remained standing with the symptoms and have interpreted these in manifold and contrary ways. Some have regarded it as a merely local ill. The most ingenious opponents have pressed for castration. They well noticed that this alleged illness is nothing other than the crisis of beginning puberty.
The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist.
Our bodies are molded rivers.
The individual soul should seek for an intimate union with the soul of the universe.
Imagination places the future world for us either above or below or in reincarnation. 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.
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.
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.
Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise.
One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand
Christianity is the root of all democracy, the highest fact in the rights of men.
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.
Philosophy can bake no bread; but she can procure for us God , Freedom , Immortality. Which, then, is more practical, Philosophy or Economy ?
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.