Novalis

Doing philosophy is only a threefold or double kind of waking--being awake--consciousness.

How can a person have a sense of something if he does not have the germ of it within himself. What I am to understand must develop organically within me--and what I seem to learn is only nourishment--stimulation of the organism.

Humanity is the higher meaning of our planet, the nerve that connects this part of it with the upper world, the eye it raises to heaven.

Humanity is a comic role.

The artist stands on the human being as a statue does on a pedestal.

Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.

Sometimes with the most intense pain a paralysis of sensibility occurs. The soul disintegrates--hence the deadly frost--the free power of the mind--the shattering, ceaseless wit of this kind of despair. There is no inclination for anything any more--the person is alone, like a baleful power--as he has no connection with the rest of the world he consumes himself gradually--and in accordance with his own principle he is--misanthropic and misotheos.

Philosophy is really nostalgia, the desire to be at home.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

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

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

Knowledge is only one half. Faith is the other.

Learning is pleasurable but doing is the height of enjoyment.

We are near waking when we dream we are dreaming.

A God-intoxicated man.

Nature is a petrified magic city.

Not only England but every Englishman is an island.

Character is perfectly educated will.