Novalis Quotes

Life, what is it but a dream?

When you talk and think of the Absolute, you have to do it in the relative; so all these logical arguments apply.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?

Nothing puzzles me more than the time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less.

Who does understand life?

I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.

Existence is illusory and it is eternal.

Life is a process of losing our illusions, until we finally lose the illusion that we're alive.

I see the world as an illusion, and we shouldn't take ourselves so seriously

What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me - that I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?

Everything is true Everything anybody has ever thought

This world may be only illusion -- but it's the only illusion we've got.

Mathematics is not only real, but it is the only reality.

A map is the dead body of where you've been. A map is the unborn baby of where you're going. There are no maps. Maps are pictures of what isn't.

Man is the measure of all things, of the reality of those which are, and of the unreality of those which are not.

Beyond positive and negative, what is Reality?

I love the world, because I love the mind that created the world.

All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.

It is reasonable to love the Absolute absolutely for the same reason it is reasonable to love the relative relatively.

This world is nothing. An illusion. Death is the release.

All progression is in the relative world.

I do value my work awfully; but in reality only consider this: all this world of ours is nothing but a speck of mildew, which has grown up on a tiny planet. And for us to suppose we can have something great - ideas, work - it's all dust and ashes.

No one thought up being. He who thinks he has, step forward.