Novalis Quotes

I want to make clear only that words are not the things spoken about, and that there is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

'Why' is a question no animal can ask, because both the question and answers require speech. Have you ever seen an animal shrug?

However fascinating you may think you are, there is a limit to what you can know about yourself.

'I' is the word everyone uses to refer to themselves. On the one hand, it points to a specific person, but it's also this blank space that you can insert yourself into; it's a chute into empathy.

If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.

I never knew words could be so confusing," Milo said to Tock as he bent down to scratch the dog's ear. "Only when you use a lot to say a little," answered Tock. Milo thought this was quite the wisest thing he'd heard all day.

The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else.

Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.

We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed.

Be really, really true to yourself. That to me, has been key to me in understanding how I want to live the second half of my life.

Those things for which we find words, are things we have already overcome.

We must plow through the whole of language.

Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication. -Aunt Beast

And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.

Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

Human language is local and changeable, and is therefore incapable of being used as the means of unchangeable and universal information.

It's not easy to know who you are and it's very painful and takes a lot of time and that is why a lot of people don't want to put in the effort.

Language cannot say everything, fortunately.

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.

It is at this point that normal language gives up, and goes and has a drink.