Hermann Hesse Quotes
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That life is difficult, I have often bitterly realized.
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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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Only the ideas that we really live have any value.
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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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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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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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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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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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Knowledge can communicated but not wisdom.
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Siddhartha stopped fighting his fate this very hour, and he stopped suffering.
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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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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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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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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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Were not the gods forms created like me and you, mortal, transient?
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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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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.
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When we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.
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Madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all 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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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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Gratitude is not a virtue I believe in, and to me it seems hypocritical to expect it from a child.
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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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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?