Hermann Hesse Quotes
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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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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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Siddhartha has one single goal-to become empty, to become empty of thirst, desire, dreams, pleasure and sorrow-to let the Self die. No longer to be Self, to experience the peace of an emptied heart, to experience pure thought-that was his goal.
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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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Your soul is the whole world.
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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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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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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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Every experience has its element of magic.
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Love is stronger than violence.
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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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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.
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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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Is not every life, every work fine?
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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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As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.
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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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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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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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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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Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.
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Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader.