Hermann Hesse Quotes
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My resolve to die was not the whim of an hour. It was the ripe, sound fruit that had slowly grown to full size, lightly rocked by the winds of fate whose next breath would bring it to the ground.
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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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It was still quiet in the house, and not a sound was heard from outside, either. Were it not for this silence, my reverie would probably have been disrupted by reminders of daily duties, of getting up and going to school.
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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 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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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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Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Samsara and Nirvana, illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real.
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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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Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.
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One can beg, buy, be presented with and find love in the streets, but it can never be stolen.
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He saw mankind going through life in a childlike manner... which he loved but also despised.... He saw them toiling, saw them suffering, and becoming gray for the sake of things which seemed to him to be entirely unworthy of this price, for money, for little pleasures, for being slightly honoured.
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The opposite of every truth is just as true.
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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.
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Lovers should not separate from each other after making love without admiring each other, without being conquered as well as conquering, so that no feeling of satiation or desolation arises nor the horrid feeling of misusing or having been misused.
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You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.
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I sped through heaven and saw god at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defenses and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart.
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Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them.
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Without a mother, one cannot love. Without a mother, one cannot die.
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Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.
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A home isn't just a roof over our heads. A home is a place where we feel loved and where we love others. It's a place we belong. Love is what makes a home, not the contents inside the house or the number on the door. It's the people waiting for us across the threshold, the people who will take us in their arms after a ad day and kiss us good night and good morning everyday for the rest of our lives.
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I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.
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One must find the source within one's own Self, one must possess it. Everything else was seeking -- a detour, an error.
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Every experience has its element of magic.