Hermann Hesse Quotes
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The best weapons against the infamies of life are courage, wilfulness and patience. Courage strenthens, wilfulness is fun and patience provides tranquility.
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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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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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What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life.
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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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Your soul is the whole world.
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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 shall begin my story with an experience I had when I was ten and attended our small town's Latin school.
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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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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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Gratitude is not a virtue I believe in, and to me it seems hypocritical to expect it from a child.
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Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence.
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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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Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.
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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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You must find your dream...but no dream lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular dream.
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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.
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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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I call that man awake who, with conscious knowledge and understanding, can perceive the deep unreasoning powers in his soul, his whole innermost strength, desire and weakness, and knows how to reckon with himself.
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You are only afriad if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them!
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Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else.
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The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life.
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Without a mother, one cannot love. Without a mother, one cannot die.