Novalis Quotes on Knowledge
Friedrich von Hardenberg — Novalis (1772–1801) — gave early German Romanticism its most distinctive metaphysical voice in the Fichte Studies (1795–96), the Pollen and Faith and Love fragments, and the unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen. The doctrine of "magical idealism" treats knowing not as the passive registration of an external world but as the active, creative work by which the imaginative self gives form to the manifold supplied to it; poetry is on this view a higher mode of cognition than the discursive understanding the early Fichte had analysed, and the encyclopaedic project of Das allgemeine Brouillon attempts the systematic articulation of the unity of all the sciences under this poeticizing principle.
Quotes
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“We seek the absolute everywhere and only ever find things.”
Everywhere we seek the Absolute, and always we find only things. -
Attributed to Novalis:
“Genius is the talent to take the contingent for the necessary.”
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“Unser Leben ist kein Traum, aber es soll und wird vielleicht einer werden.”
Our life is no dream, but it should and will perhaps become one. | Novalis Schriften , 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1805) vol. 2, Fragmente , I, p. 188. Translated in George MacDonald, Lilith (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co, 1895) ch. 47, p. 351 | Other translations: Our life is no dream; but it ought to become one, and perhaps will. George MacDonald, Phantastes: A Faerie Romance (London: Daldy, Isbister, & Co, -
“There are ideal series of events which run parallel with the real ones. They rarely coincide. Men and circumstances generally modify the ideal train of events, so that it seems imperfect, and its consequences are equally imperfect. Thus with the Reformation; instead of Protestantism came Lutheranism.”
Es giebt eine Reihe idealischer Begebenheiten, die der Wirklichkeit parallel läuft. Selten fallen sie zusammen. Menschen und Zufälle modificiren gewöhnlich die idealische Begebenheit, so dass sie unvollkommen erscheint, und ihre Folgen gleiche falls unvollkommen sind. So bei der Reformation; stat des Protestantismus kam das Lutherthum hervor. -
“Schicksal und Gemüt sind Namen eines Begriffs.”
Fate and temperament are the names of a concept. | Quoted in Hermann Hesse , Demian (1921) ch. 4. Translated by W. J. Strachan (1972). Translated by Michael Roloff and Michael Lebeck (1965): "Fate and temperament are two words for one and the same concept. -
“Fate and temperament are the names of a concept.”
Schicksal und Gemüt sind Namen eines Begriffs.