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
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.
The world must become romanticized, and in that way we find again its original meaning for us.
Before abstraction everything is one, but one like chaos; after abstraction everything is united again, but this union is a free binding of autonomous, self-determined beings. Out of a mob a society has developed, chaos has been transformed into a manifold world.
The world must be romanticized. In this way the originary meaning may be found again.
The brains -the thinking organs- are the world producers -nature's genitals.
Building worlds is not enough for the deeper urging mind; but a loving heart sates the striving spirit.
The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature.
Love works magic. It is the finalpurpose of the world story, the Amen of the universe.
The mysterious path goes inward. It is in us, and not anywhere else, where the eternity of the worlds, the past and the future are found.
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.
To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.
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.
Doing philosophy is only a threefold or double kind of waking--being awake--consciousness.