Hermann Hesse Quotes
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When two cultures collide is the only time when true suffering exists.
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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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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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Without a mother, one cannot love. Without a mother, one cannot die.
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All men of goodwill have this in common - that our works put us to shame.
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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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One can beg, buy, be presented with and find love in the streets, but it can never be stolen.
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I have always been a great dreamer; in dreams I am more active than in my real life, and these shadows sapped me of health and energy.
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I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.
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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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In the beginning was the myth.
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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 known it for a long time but I have only just experienced it. Now I know it not only with my intellect, but with my eyes, with my heart, with my stomach.
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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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Love is stronger than violence.
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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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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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Every experience has its element of magic.
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For the first time in my life I tasted death, and death tasted bitter, for death is birth, is fear and dread of some terrible renewal.
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Is not every life, every work fine?
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As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.
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What for me is bliss and life and ecstasy and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in life it finds it absurd.
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Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old brittle husk.
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When all the Self was conquered and dead, when all passions and desires were silent, then the last must awaken, the innermost of Being that is no longer Self - the great secret!