Novalis

From BillionQuotes

We are near waking when we dream that we dream.

Baron Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg (2 May 1772 - 25 March 1801) German author, philosopher and poet; most commonly known by the pseudonym Novalis (denoting a "clearer of new land" — derived from a tradition of his ancestors, who had called themselves de Novali).

1 Sourced
- 1.1 Blüthenstaub (1798)
2 Attributed
3 External links

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Sourced

Love is the final end of the world's history, the Amen of the universe.
- Fragments (1799-1800); as translated by W. Hastie in Thoughts on Religion, Pt. 1, "Hymns and Thoughts on Religion" (1888), edited by W. Hastie
- Variant: Love is the final purpose of world history — the Amen of the universe.

Die Liebe wirkt magisch.
Sie ist der Endzweck
der Weltgeschichte,
das Amen des Universums.
- Love works magic.
  It is the final purpose
  Of the world story,
  The Amen of the universe.
- Fragments
  - Variant translations: Love works magically...
    Love causes magic...

Das höchste Leben ist Mathematik.
- The highest life is mathematics.
- Fragments

Reine Mathematik ist Religion.
- The pure mathematics is religion.
- Fragments

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Blüthenstaub (1798)

Quotations sourced to Blüthenstaub [Pollen] or Blüthenstaub-Fragmente [Pollen and Fragments]

Friends, the soil is poor, we must sow seeds in plenty for us to garner even modest harvests.
- Motto

Everywhere we seek the Absolute, and always we find only things.
- Fragment No. 1; Variant: We seek the absolute everywhere and only ever find things.

Denotation by means of sounds and markings is a remarkable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me; several lines a million things. How easy becomes the manipulation of the universe here, how evident the concentration of the intellectual world! Language is the dynamics of the spiritual realm. One word of command moves armies; the word Liberty entire nations.
- Fragment No. 2

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.
- Fragment No. 16; Variant translation: We dream of journeys through the cosmos — Is the cosmos not then in us? We do not know the depths of our own spirit. — The mysterious path leads within. In us, or nowhere, is eternity with its worlds — the past and the future.

Self-alienation is the source of all degradation as well as, on the contrary, the basis of all true elevation. The first step will be a look inward, an isolating contemplation of our self. Whoever remains standing here proceeds only halfway. The second step must be an active look outward, an autonomous, determined observation of the outer world.
- Fragment No. 24 Variant translation: The first step is to look within, the discriminating contemplation of the self. He who remains at this point only half develops. The second step must be a telling look without, independent, sustained contemplation of the external world.

We are on a mission: we are called to the cultivation of the earth.
- Fragment No. 32; Variant translations: We are on a mission.We are called to form the earth.
  We are on a mission.We are called to educate the earth.

Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise.
- Fragment No. 51; Jeder geliebte Gegenstand ist der Mittelpunkt eines Paradieses.
- Variant translation: Every beloved object is the midpoint to paradise.

The best thing about the sciences is their philosophical ingredient, like life for an organic body. If one dephilosophizes the sciences, what remains left? Earth, air, and water.
- Fragment No. 62

Nothing is more indispensable to true religiosity than a mediator that links us with divinity.
- Fragment No. 74

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.
- Fragment No. 88

Building worlds is not enough for the deeper urging mind; but a loving heart sates the striving spirit.
- Fragment No. 91

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.
- Fragment No. 95

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.
- Fragment No. 96

Where children are, there is a golden age.
- Fragment No. 97

Many counterrevolutionary books have been written in favor of the Revolution. But Burke has written a revolutionary book against the Revolution.
- Fragment No. 104; On Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

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.
- Fragment No. 105

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.
- Fragment No. 109

The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented. Fragments of this nature are literary seeds. There may be many an infertile grain among them: nevertheless, if only some come up!
- Fragment No. 114

Sourced to Blütenstaub or Blüthenstaub-Fragmente but fragment number needed:

We are near waking when we dream that we dream.
- As quoted by Edgar Allan Poe in "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" (1844)
- Variants: We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.
  We are near waking when we dream we are dreaming.

Man is a sun and his senses are the planets.

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.

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Attributed

With German text:

Schlafen ist Verdauen der Sinneseindrücke. Träume sind Exkremente.
- Sleep is a digest of sensial impressions. Dreams are excrements.

Ein Gottbetrunkener Mensch
- A God-intoxicated man
- Said of Spinoza.

Without German text:

A character is a completely fashioned will.

Apprenticeship suits the novice poet — academic study the novice philosopher.

Christianity is the root of all democracy, the highest fact in the rights of men.

Death is a victory over the self — which, like all self-conquest, brings about a new, easier existence.

Learning is pleasurable but doing is the height of enjoyment.

Life is the beginning of death. Life is for the sake of death. Death is at once the end and the beginning — at once separation and closer union of the self. Through death the reduction is complete.

Nature is incomprehensible per se. Stillness and formed incomprehensibility. Philosophy is prose. Her consonants. Distant philosophy sounds like poesy – because every call into the distance becomes a vowel. So everything at a distance becomes poesy – poem.