Hermann Hesse Quotes
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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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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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It is a pity that you students aren't fully aware of the luxury and abundance in which you live.
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I can think. I can wait. I can fast.
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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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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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Everyone can reach his goal, if he can think, wait and fast.
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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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Your soul is the whole world.
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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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Every experience has its element of magic.
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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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. . . gentleness is stronger than severity, water is stronger than rock, love is stronger than force.
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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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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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Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.
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As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.