NOVALIS

Philosophy is properly home-sickness; the wish to be everywhere at home.

Learning is pleasurable but doing is the height of enjoyment.

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

A character is a completely fashioned will.

We never completely comprehend ourselves, but we can do far more than comprehend.

I often feel, and ever more deeply I realize, that fate and character are the same conception.

Knowledge is only one half. Faith is the other.

We are near waking when we dream we are dreaming.

We are more closely connected to the invisible than to the visible.

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

Where no gods are, spectres rule.

Character and fate are two words for the same thing.

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

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

A hero is one who knows how to hang on one minute longer.

To become properly acquainted with a truth, we must first have disbelieved it, and disputed against it.

Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise.

Nothing is more indispensable to true religiosity than a mediator that links us with divinity.

Nature is a petrified magic city.

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

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Man is a sun and his senses are the planets.

Man has his being in truth--if he sacrifices truth he sacrifices himself. Whoever betrays truth betrays himself. It is not a question of lying--but of acting against one's conviction.

Fate and temperament are the names of a concept.

Every stage of education begins with childhood. That is why the most educated person on earth so much resembles a child.