Novalis

There is not much to work with here, because it is such a short reading, but here are my thoughts nonetheless...
When Novalis states how "philosophy is really homesickness", I can wrap my mind around this concept. Philosophy is defined as 1) a belief accepted as authoritative, or 2) the rational investigation of questions about existence and knowledge and ethics, or 3) any personal belief about how to live or how to deal with a situation. Any of these definitions suffice in helping to understand why you could replace the definition with homesickness. All that philosophy is looking for is a comfort area, what you can hold to, something that is real and true to you...something similar to home. We desire an innate feeling of goodness, along with familiarity to be able to cope with life. Philosophy is just how you find this for yourself. And then it is labeled.
When he says that "when we understand how to love one thing-then we also understand how best to love everything", I don't know if I particularly agree. When we are small, we understand how to love mom, but we do not understand how to best love everything else. In fact, the world is pretty damn scary. Or let's take the example of having a "first love". When I had my first love, I understood how to love that person, and granted, it did teach me a lot about love, and the different concepts and ideals included in that one word, but I don't think that I understood then how best to love everything....rather, I understood more that everything thrived off of this amazing thing called love.