Hermann Hesse Quotes
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Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.
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Words can not express the joy of new life.
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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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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.
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He had thrown himself away, he had lost interest in everything, and life, falling in with his feelings, had demanded nothing of him. He had lived as an outsider, an idler and onlooker, well liked in his young manhood, alone in his illness and advancing years. Seized with weariness, he sat down on the wall, and the river murmured darkly in his thoughts.
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For a while I shall still be leaving, looking back at you as you slip away into the magic islands of the mind. But for a while now all are alive, believing that in a single poignant hour we did say all that we could ever say in a great flowing out of radiant power. It was like seeing and then going blind.
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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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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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...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.
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You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.
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Abraxas was the god who was both god and devil.
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All life was a breath exhaled by God. All dying was a breath inhaled by God.
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And some day there will be nothing left of everything that has twisted my life and grieved it and filled me so often with such anguish. Some day, with the last exhaustion, peace will come and the motherly earth will gather me back home. It won't be the end of things, only a way of being born again, a bathing and a slumbering where the old and the withered sink down, where the young and new begin to breathe. Then, with other thoughts, I will walk along streets like these, and listen to streams, and overhear what the sky says in the evening, over and over and over.
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My resolve to die was not the whim of an hour. It was the ripe, sound fruit that had slowly grown to full size, lightly rocked by the winds of fate whose next breath would bring it to the ground.
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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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Man designs for himself a garden with a hundred kinds of trees, a thousand kinds of flowers, a hundred kinds of fruit and vegetables. Suppose, then, that the gardener of this garden knew no other distinction between edible and inedible, nine-tenths of this garden would be useless to him. He would pull up the most enchanting flowers and hew down the noblest trees and even regard them with a loathing and envious eye. This is what the Steppenwolf does with the thousand flowers of his soul. What does not stand classified as either man or wolf he does not see at all.
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How could I fail to be a lone wolf, and an uncouth hermit, as I did not share one of its aims nor understand one of its pleasures?
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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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Beauty does not bring happiness to the one who possesses it, but to the one who loves and admires it.
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Yes, I am going into the woods; I am going into the unity of all things.
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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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It is remarkable, all that men can swallow. For a good ten minutes I read a newspaper. I allowed the spirit of an irresponsible man who chews and munches another's words in his mouth, and gives them out again undigested, to enter into me through my eyes.
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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.