Hermann Hesse Quotes
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A girl had bidden me eat and drink and sleep, and had shown me friendship and had laughed at me and had called me a silly little boy. And this wonderful friend had talked to me of the saints and shown me that even when I had outdone myself in absurdity I was not alone.
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What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world.
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It is a pity that you students aren't fully aware of the luxury and abundance in which you live.
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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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Were not the gods forms created like me and you, mortal, transient?
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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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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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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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Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.
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But peace, too, is a living thing and like all life it must wax and wane, accommodate, withstand trials, and undergo changes.
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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 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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Everyone can reach his goal, if he can think, wait and fast.
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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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Your soul is the whole world.
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I was given the freedom to discover my own inclination and talents, to fashion my inmost pleasures and sorrows myself and to regard the future not as an alien higher power but as the hope and product of my own strength.
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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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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 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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If what matters in a person's existence is to accept the inevitable consciously, to taste the good and bad to the full and to make for oneself a more individual, unaccidental and inward destiny alongside one's external fate, then my life has been neither empty nor worthless.
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I can think. I can wait. I can fast.
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As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.
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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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To recognize causes is to think, and through thought alone feelings become knowledge and are not lost, but become real and begin to mature.