Hermann Hesse Quotes
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Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
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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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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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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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The human attitude of which classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory over blind change. Classical music as gesture signifies knowledge of the tragedy of the human condition, affirmation of human destiny, courage, cheerful serenity.
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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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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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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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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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People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.
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Yes, I am going into the woods; I am going into the unity of all things.
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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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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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Good that you ask. You should always ask, always have doubts.
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He had loved and he had found himself. Most people love to lose themselves.
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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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All interpretation, all psychology, all attempts to make things comprehensible, require the medium of theories, mythologies, and lies.
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So you can't dance? Not at all? Not even one step? How can you say that you've taken any trouble to live when you won't even dance?
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Love of God is not always the same as love of good.
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Yes, what we are doing is probably mad, and probably it is good and necessary all the same. It is not a good thing when man overstrains his reason and tries to reduce to rational order matters that are susceptible of rational treatment. Then there arise ideals such as those of the Americans or of the Bolsheviks. Both are extraordinarily rational, and both lead to a frightful oppression and impoverishment of life, because they simplify it so crudely. The likeness of man, once a high ideal, is in process of becoming a machine-made article. It is for madmen like us, perhaps, to ennoble it again.
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A girl had bidden me eat and drink and sleep, and had shown me friendship and had laughed at me and had called me a silly little boy. And this wonderful friend had talked to me of the saints and shown me that even when I had outdone myself in absurdity I was not alone.
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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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...Every ego so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though is was a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares this delusion.
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The mind is international and supra-national ... it ought to serve not war and annihilation, but peace and reconciliation.