Hermann Hesse Quotes
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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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There was once a man, Harry, called the steppenwolf. He went on two legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in reality a wolf of the steppes. He had learned a good deal of all that people of a good intelligence can, and was a fairly clever fellow. What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own 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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But one thing this doctrine, so clean, so venerable, does not contain: it does nto contain the secret of what the Sublime One himself experienced, he alone among the hundreds of thousands. This is why I am continuing my wanderings not to seek another, better doctrine, because I know there is none, but to leave behind all the teachings and all teachers, and either attain my goal alone or die.
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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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If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.
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What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life.
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The many-voiced song of the river echoed softly. Siddhartha looked into the river and saw many pictures in the flowing water. The river's voice was sorrowful. It sang with yearning and sadness, flowing towards its goal ... Siddhartha was now listening intently...to this song of a thousand voices ... then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om - Perfection ... From that hour Siddhartha ceased to fight against his destiny.
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Were not the gods forms created like me and you, mortal, transient?
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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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If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.
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Should we be mindful of dreams?" Joseph asked. "Can we interpret them?" The Master looked into his eyes and said tersely: "We should be mindful of everything, for we can interpret everything.
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I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference.
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That is why we were drawn to one another and why we are brother and sister. I am going to teach you to dance and play and smile, and still not be happy. And you are going to teach me to think and to know and yet not be happy. Do you know that we are both children of the Devil?
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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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Faith and doubt go hand in hand, they are complementaries. One who never doubts will never truly believe.
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The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.
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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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Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence.
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Your soul is the whole world.
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He lost his Self a thousand times and for days on end he dwelt in non-being. But although the paths took him away from Self, in the end they always led back to it. Although Siddhartha fled from the Self a thousand times, dwelt in nothing, dwelt in animal and stone, the return was inevitable; the hour was inevitable when he would again find himself in sunshine or in moonlight, in shadow or in rain, and was again Self and Siddhartha, again felt the torment of the onerous life cycle.
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The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.
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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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Things are going downhill with you!' he said to himself, and laughed about it, and as he was saying it, he happened to glance at the river, and he also saw the river going downhill, always moving on downhill, and singing and being happy through it all.