Quote #80

Life is the beginning of death. Life is for the sake of death. Death is at once the end and the beginning - at once separation and closer union of the self. Through death the reduction is complete.

More from Novalis

  1. Learning is pleasurable but doing is the height of enjoyment.
  2. Nature is incomprehensible per se. Stillness and formed incomprehensibility. Philosophy is prose. Her consonants. Distant philosophy sounds…
  3. Death is a victory over the self - which, like all self-conquest, brings about a new, easier existence.
  4. Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.
  5. Christianity is the root of all democracy, the highest fact in the rights of men.
  6. Only as far as a man is happily married to himself is he fit for married life and family life in general.
  7. Apprenticeship suits the novice poet - academic study the novice philosopher.
  8. Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

All Novalis quotes