Hermann Hesse Quotes
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Faith is stronger than so-called reality.
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I have no desire to walk on water," said Siddhartha. "Let the old shamans satisfy themselves with such skills".
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Friendship is identification and difference.
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He saw merchants trading, princes hunting, mourners wailing for their dead, whores offering themselves, physicians trying to help the sick, priests determining the most suitable day for seeding, lovers loving, mothers nursing their children—and all of this was not worthy of one look from his eye, it all lied, it all stank, it all stank of lies, it all pretended to be meaningful and joyful and beautiful, and it all was just concealed putrefaction. The world tasted bitter. Life was torture.
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Every healthy person must have a goal in life and that life must have content.
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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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Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?" That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.
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Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.
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People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.
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When we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.
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Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.
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...and gradually his face assumed the expressions which are so often found among rich people - the expressions of discontent, of sickliness, of displeasure, of idleness, of lovelessness. Slowly the soul sickness of the rich crept over him.
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All suicides have the responsibility of fighting against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be conquered by life than to fall by one's own hand.
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In my brain were stored a thousand pictures.
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Solitude is independence.
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Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.
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And here is a doctrine at which you will laugh. It seems to me, Govinda, that love is the most important thing in the world.
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Each man had only one genuine vocation to find the way to himself.
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Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.
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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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Every politician in the world is all for revolution, reason, and disarmament-but only in enemy countries, not in his own.
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Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.
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To achieve the possible, we must attempt the impossible again and again.
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Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.