Hermann Hesse Quotes
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He was taught by the river. Incessantly, he learned from it. Most of all, he learned from it to listen, to pay close attention with a quiet heart, with a waiting, opened soul, without passion, without a wish, without judgement, without an opinion.
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All the books of the world full of thoughts and poems are nothing in comparison to a minute of sobbing, when feeling surges in waves, the soul feels itself profoundly and finds itself. Tears are the melting ice of snow. All angels are close to the crying person.
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Rain Soft rain, summer rain Whispers from bushes, whispers from trees. Oh, how lovely and full of blessing To dream and be satisfied. I was so long in the outer brightness, I am not used to this upheaval: Being at home in my own soul, Never to be led elsewhere. I want nothing, I long for nothing, I hum gently the sounds of childhood, And I reach home astounded In the warm beauty of dreams. Heart, how torn you are, How blessed to plow down blindly, To think nothing, to know nothing, Only to breathe, only to feel.
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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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All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?
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Opinions mean nothing; they may be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can embrace or reject them.
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So she thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it. She taught him that after a celebration of love the lovers should not part without admiring each other, without being conquered or having conquered, so that neither is bleak or glutted or has the bad feeling of being used or misused.
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That life is difficult, I have often bitterly realized.
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Friendship is identification and difference.
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What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world.
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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 important cultural gesture comes down to a morality, a model for human behavior concentrated into a gesture.
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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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The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been given back to me today by this friend of mine who taught me dancing.
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Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.
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What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.
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Madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom.
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Every healthy person must have a goal in life and that life must have content.
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When trying to remember my share in the glow of the eternal present, in the smile of God, I return to my childhood, too, for that is where the most significant discoveries turn up.
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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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The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people — eternal 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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Knowledge can communicated but not wisdom.
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But peace, too, is a living thing and like all life it must wax and wane, accommodate, withstand trials, and undergo changes.