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Friendship, love, and piety ought to be handled with a sort of mysterious secrecy they ought to be spoken of only in the rare moments of perfect confidence, to be mutually understood in silence. Many things are too delicate to be thought many more, to be spoken.

Novalis

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Novalis
Age: 28 †
Born: 1772
Born: May 2
Died: 1801
Died: March 25
Engineer
Literary Theorist
Lyricist
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg
Friedrich von Hardenberg
Love
Silence
Secrecy
Ought
Spoken
Sort
Delicate
Perfect
Rare
Moments
Mysterious
Handled
Thought
Confidence
Mutually
Many
Friendship
Delicacy
Things
Understood
Piety

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Character and fate are two words for the same thing
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The brains -the thinking organs- are the world producers -nature's genitals.
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Man is a sun and his senses are the planets.
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The world must be romanticized. In this way the originary meaning may be found again.
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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.
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All the events of our life are materials of which we can make what we will.
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Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.
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When one begins to reflect on philosophy—then philosophy seems to us to be everything, like God, and love. It is a mystical, highly potent, penetrating idea—which ceaselessly drives us inward in all directions. The decision to do philosophy—to seek philosophy is the act of self-liberation—the thrust toward ourselves.
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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!
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Prayer is to religion what thinking is to philosophy. To pray is to make religion.
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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.
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In cheerful souls there is no wit. Wit shows a disturbance of the equipoise.
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Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.
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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.
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Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.
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The artist stands on the human being as a statue does on a pedestal.
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To become properly acquainted with a truth, we must first have disbelieved it, and disputed against it.
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Hypotheses are nets: only he who casts will catch.
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