Hermann Hesse Quotes
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Painting is marvelous; it makes you happier and more patient. Afterwards you do not have black fingers as with writing, but blue and red ones.
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Alas, Siddhartha, I see you suffering, but you're suffering a pain at which one would like to laugh, at which you'll soon laugh for yourself.
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To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.
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Those who direct the maximum force of their desires toward the center, toward true being, toward perfection, seem quieter than the passionate souls because the flame of their fervor cannot always be seen.
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Friendship is identification and difference.
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The mind is international and supra-national ... it ought to serve not war and annihilation, but peace and reconciliation.
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A person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful.
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To achieve the possible, we must attempt the impossible again and again.
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For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers.
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A tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me!... Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
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I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am responsible for what I do with the life I've got.
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The world, Govinda my friend, is not imperfect, not to be seen as on a slow path toward perfection: No, it is perfect in every moment, all transgression already bears grace within itself, all little children already have the aged in themselves, all the sucklings death, all the dying eternal life.
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Look: We hate nothing that exists, not even death, suffering and dying, does not horrify our souls, as long as we learn more deeply to love.
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His way had therefore come full circle, or rather had taken the form of an ellipse or a spiral, following as ever no straight unbroken line, for the rectilinear belongs only to Geometry and not to Nature and Life.
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What is meditation?... It is fleeing from the self, it is a short escape of the agony of being a self, it is a short numbing of the senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life. The same escape, the same short numbing is what the driver of an ox-cart finds in the inn, drinking a few bowls of rice wine or fermented coconut-milk.
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In any case, the most lively young people become the best old people, not those who pretend to be as wise as grandfathers while they are still at school.
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It was lovely, and tempting, to exert power over men and to shine before others, but power also had its perditions and perils.
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You must find your dream, then the way becomes easy.
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What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you're searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don't find the time for finding?
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He saw that the water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new.
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He had loved and he had found himself. Most people love to lose themselves.
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God does not send us despair in order to kill us; he sends it in order to awaken us to new life.
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For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.
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All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?