Talk:Novalis

what is this? there are no quotes here. is that acceptable? what's the point? --sasha--

Unsourced

Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable and precise source for any quote on this list please move it to Novalis. --Antiquary 19:49, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

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:

• 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.

• Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

• Only as far as a man is happily married to himself is he fit for married life and family life in general.

• The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist.

• The more poetic, the more real. This is the core of my philosophy.

• The spirit is perpetually proving itself.

• The world state is the body, which is — animated by the world of beauty, the world of sociability. It is the necessary instrument of this world.

• To know a truth well, one must have fought it out.

• We shall never entirely comprehend ourselves, but we will and can do much more than comprehend ourselves.