The idea of a perfect health is interesting only in a scientific point of view.  Sickness is necessary to individualization.

If God could be man, he can also be stone, plant, animal, element, and perhaps, in this way, there is a continuous redemption in Nature.

Life is a disease of the spirit, a passionate activity.  Rest is the peculiar property of the spirit.  From the spirit comes gravitation.

As nothing can be free, so, too, nothing can be forced, but spirit.

A space-filling individual is a body; a time-filling individual is a soul.

It should be inquired whether Nature has not essentially changed with the progress of culture.

All activity ceases when knowledge comes.  The state of knowing is eudaemonism, blest repose of contemplation, heavenly quietism.

Miracles, as contradictions of Nature, are amathematical.  But there are no miracles in this sense.  What we so term, is intelligible precisely by means of mathematics; for nothing is miraculous to mathematics.

In music, mathematics appears formally, as revelation, as creative idealism.  All enjoyment is musical, consequently mathematical.  The highest life is mathematics.

There may be mathematicians of the first magnitude who cannot cipher.  One can be a great cipherer without a conception of mathematics.

Instinct is genius in Paradise, before the period of self-abstraction (self-recognition).

The fate which oppresses us is the sluggishness of our spirit.  By enlargement and cultivation of our activity, we change ourselves into fate.  Everything appears to stream in upon us, because we do not stream out.  We are negative, because we choose to be so; the more positive we become, the more negative will the world around us be, until, at last, there is no more negative, and we are all in all.  God wills gods.

All power appears only in transition.  Permanent power is stuff.

Every act of introversion—­every glance into our interior—­is at the same time ascension, going up to heaven, a glance at the veritable outward.

Only so far as a man is happily married to himself, is he fit for married life and family life, generally.

One must never confess that one loves one’s self.  The secret of this confession is the life-principle of the only true and eternal love.

We conceive God as personal, just as we conceive ourselves personal.  God is just as personal and as individual as we are; for what we call I is not our true I, but only its off glance.

HYMN TO NIGHT (1800)

By NOVALIS

TRANSLATED BY PAUL B. THOMAS