Hermann Hesse Quotes
-
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.
-
Art is the contemplation of the world in a state of grace.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Friendship is identification and difference.
-
Every important cultural gesture comes down to a morality, a model for human behavior concentrated into a gesture.
-
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.
-
Every politician in the world is all for revolution, reason, and disarmament-but only in enemy countries, not in his own.
-
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.
-
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.
-
That life is difficult, I have often bitterly realized.
-
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.
-
I have no desire to walk on water," said Siddhartha. "Let the old shamans satisfy themselves with such skills".
-
What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you're searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don't find the time for finding?
-
Knowledge can communicated but not wisdom.
-
To be able to throw one's self away for the sake of a moment, to be able to sacrifice years for a woman's smile - that is happiness.
-
Madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom.
-
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.
-
There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.
-
Abraxas was the god who was both god and devil.
-
A father can pass on his nose and eyes and even his intelligence to his child, but not his soul. In every human being the soul is new
-
You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality. That is the prison where you lie.
-
Siddhartha stopped fighting his fate this very hour, and he stopped suffering.
-
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.