Hermann Hesse Quotes
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To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.
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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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For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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They slept profoundly, desperately, greedily, as though for the last time, as though they had been condemned to stay awake forever and had to drink in all the sleep in the world during these last hours.
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We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.
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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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Friendship is identification and difference.
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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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A person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful.
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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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The mind is international and supra-national ... it ought to serve not war and annihilation, but peace and reconciliation.
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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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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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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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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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Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.
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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?