Hermann Hesse Quotes
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People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.
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To nobody can you communicate in words and teachings, what happened to you in your hour of enlightenment.
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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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Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.
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So wie die Verruecktheit in einem hoeheren Sinn, der Anfang aller Weisheit ist, so ist die Schizophrenie der Anfang aller Kunst, aller Phantasie. (As insanity in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizophrenia the beginning of all art, all fantasy.)
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Every phenomenon on earth is symbolic, and each symbol is an open gate through which the soul, if it is ready, can enter into the inner part of the world, where you and I and day and night are all one.
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Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.
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I believe that the struggle against death, the unconditional and self-willed determination to live, is the mode of power behind the lives and activities of all outstanding men.
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Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain-that it may perhaps be this is not important-but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the small from the same stream, from the same law of cause, of becoming and dying.
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At that time two opposing concepts of the Game called forth commentary and discussion. The foremost players distinguished two principal types of Game, the formal and the psychological.
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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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...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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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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Love of God is not always the same as love of good.
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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.
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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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I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.
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The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. The God's name is Abraxas.
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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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Our friendship has no other purpose, no other reason, than to show you how utterly unlike me you are.
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One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.
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The world was beautiful when looked at in this way-without any seeking, so simple, so childlike.
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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 opposite of every truth is just as true.