Hermann Hesse Quotes
-
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?
-
One must find the source within one's own Self, one must possess it. Everything else was seeking -- a detour, an error.
-
Your soul is the whole world.
-
Gratitude is not a virtue I believe in, and to me it seems hypocritical to expect it from a child.
-
I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.
-
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.
-
When two cultures collide is the only time when true suffering exists.
-
The opposite of every truth is just as true.
-
Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
One can beg, buy, be presented with and find love in the streets, but it can never be stolen.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.