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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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 have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.
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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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I believe that the struggle against death, the unconditional and self-willed determination to live, is the mode of power behind the lives and activities of all outstanding men.
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The opposite of every truth is just as true.
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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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How absurd these words are, such as beast and beast of prey. One should not speak of animals in that way. They may be terrible sometimes, but they're much more right than men...They're never in any embarrassment. They always know what to do and how to behave themselves. They don't flatter and they don't intrude. They don't pretend. They are as they are, like stones or flowers or stars in the sky.
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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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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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Without a mother, one cannot love. Without a mother, one cannot die.
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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 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 I were poet now, I would not resist the temptation to trace my life back through the delicate shadows of my childhood to the precious and sheltered sources of my earliest memories. But these possessions are far too dear and sacred for the person I now am to spoil for myself. All there is to say of my childhood is that it was good and happy. I was given the freedom to discover my own inclinations 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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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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Your soul is the whole world.
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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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Were not the gods forms created like me and you, mortal, transient?
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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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Love is stronger than violence.
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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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Everyone can reach his goal, if he can think, wait and fast.
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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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Fortunately, like most children, I had learned what is most valuable, most indispensable for life before school years began, taught by apple trees, by rain and sun, river and woods.