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
Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.
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.
Every stage of education begins with childhood. That is why the most educated person on earth so much resembles a child.
We never completely comprehend ourselves, but we can do far more than comprehend.
Philosophy is properly home-sickness; the wish to be everywhere at home.
Perceptibility is a kind of attentiveness.
Philosophy ... bears witness to the deepest love of reflection, to absolute delight in wisdom.
A character is a completely fashioned will.
The history of every individual man should be a Bible.
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.
Humanity is a comic role.
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.
The badge of honesty is simplicity.
Everything at a distance turns into poetry; distant mountains, distant people, distant events; all become Romantic.