Novalis

Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.

Man consists in Truth. If he exposes Truth, he exposes himself. If he betrays Truth, he betrays himself. We speak not here of lies, but of acting against Conviction.

Nature is an Æolian Harp, a musical instrument; whose tones again are keys to higher strings in us.

If our Bodily Life is a burning, our Spiritual Life is a being burnt, a Combustion (or, is precisely the inverse the case?); Death, therefore, perhaps a Change of Capacity.

العبقريّةُ هي القدرةُ على الإهتمام بالأمور الخياليّة والحقائق ومعالجتُها.

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.

A criminal cannot complain about wrongs done him because one treats him harshly and inhumanely. His offense was an entry into the realm of violence, power and tyranny. There is no restraint and proportion in that realm,
and therefore he should not be surprised at the disproportion of its counter-reaction.

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.

Up to now our thinking was either purely mechanical - discursive - atomistic - or purely intuitive - dynamic. Perhaps now the time for union has come?

Where are we really going? Always home.

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.

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.

Der wahre Leser muss der erweiterte Autor sein.

Many counterrevolutionary books have been written in favor of the Revolution. But Burke has written a revolutionary book against the Revolution.

Light had its allotted time; but timeless and infinite is the reign of the night − the duration of sleep eternal.