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
To become properly acquainted with a truth, we must first have disbelieved it, and disputed against it.
Nature is a petrified magic city.
Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise.
We are more closely connected to the invisible than to the visible.
Nothing is more indispensable to true religiosity than a mediator that links us with divinity.
Where children are, there is the golden age.
Only as far as a man is happily married to himself is he fit for married life and family life in general.
We never completely comprehend ourselves, but we can do far more than comprehend.
Learning is pleasurable but doing is the height of enjoyment.
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.
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.
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.
The world must become romanticized, and in that way we find again its original meaning for us.
Doing philosophy is only a threefold or double kind of waking--being awake--consciousness.