Novalis Quotes

The imagination places the world of the future either far above us, or far below, or in a relation of metempsychosis to ourselves. We dream of traveling through the universe — but is not the universe within ourselves? The depths of our spirit are unknown to us — the mysterious way leads inwards. Eternity with its worlds — the past and future — is in ourselves or nowhere. The external world is the world of shadows — it throws its shadow into the realm of light. At present this realm certainly seems to us so dark inside, lonely, shapeless. But how entirely different it will seem to us — when this gloom is past, and the body of shadows has moved away. We will experience greater enjoyment than ever, for our spirit has been deprived.

Oh draw at my heart, love,
Draw till I'm gone,
That, fallen asleep, I
Still may love on.
I feel the flow of
Death's youth-giving flood
To balsam and ether
Transform my blood — I live all the daytime
In faith and in might
And in holy fire
I die every night.

Humanity is a comic role.

Play is experimenting with chance.

One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand

The world must be romanticized. Only in that way will one rediscover its original senses. Romanticization is nothing less than a qualitative raising of the power of a thing . . . I romanticize something when I give the commonplace a higher meaning, the known the dignity of the unknown, and the finite the appearance of the infinite.

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.

And now I awaken, for I am both yours and mine.

Every individual is the center of a system of emanation.

To philosophize means to make vivid.

But even more heavenly than the flashing
stars are those infinite eyes which the night opens within us, and which see further even than the palest of those
innumerable hosts.

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

How can a person have a sense of something if he does not have the germ of it within himself. What I am to understand must develop organically within me — and what I seem to learn is only nourishment — stimulation of the organism.

I turn away from the light to the holy, inexpressible, mysterious night. Far away lies the world − sunk into a
deep vault, its place waste and lonely. Across my heart strings a low melancholy plays. I will fall in drops of dew and merge with the ashes. Distant memories, the wishes of youth, the dreams of childhood, the brief joys and vain hopes of a long life – all arise dressed in grey, like evening mist after sunset. In other lands light has
pitched its merry tents. And if it never returned to its children, who would await its dawning with the innocence of faith?

Love works magic.
It is the final purpose
of the world story,
the Amen of the universe.