Hermann Hesse Quotes
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Every healthy person must have a goal in life and that life must have content.
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Life is waiting everywhere, the future is flowering everywhere, but we only see a small part of it and step on much of it with our feet.
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Were not the gods forms created like me and you, mortal, transient?
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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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A thousand times I was ready to regret and take back my rash statement - yet it had been the truth.
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The voices of all creatures are in the voices of the river.
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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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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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The opposite of every truth is just as true.
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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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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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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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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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Everyone can reach his goal, if he can think, wait and fast.
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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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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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Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.
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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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When a writer receives praise or blame, when he arouses sympathy or is ridiculed, when he is loved or rejected, it is not on the strength of his thoughts and dreams as a whole, but only of that infinitesimal part which has been able to make its way through the narrow channel of language and the equally narrow channel of the reader's understanding.
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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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Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.
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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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. . . gentleness is stronger than severity, water is stronger than rock, love is stronger than force.