Hermann Hesse Quotes
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Only the ideas that we really live have any value.
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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 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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The voices of all creatures are in the voices of the river.
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Were not the gods forms created like me and you, mortal, transient?
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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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That's the way it is when you love. It makes you suffer, and I have suffered much in the years since. But it matters little that you suffer, so long as you feel alive with a sense of the close bond that connects all living things, so long as love does not die!
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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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He saw mankind going through life in a childlike manner... which he loved but also despised.... He saw them toiling, saw them suffering, and becoming gray for the sake of things which seemed to him to be entirely unworthy of this price, for money, for little pleasures, for being slightly honoured.
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People know, or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the world of mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer's slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue.
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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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Gratitude is not a virtue I believe in, and to me it seems hypocritical to expect it from a child.
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That life is difficult, I have often bitterly realized.
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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
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I had grown a thin mustache, I was a full-grown man, and yet I was completely helpless and without a goal in life.
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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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Words can not express the joy of new life.
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You've never lived what you are thinking, and that isn't good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.
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There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.
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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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Knowledge can communicated but not wisdom.
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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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Love must not entreat,' she added, 'or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract.
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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.