Hermann Hesse Quotes
-
Love is stronger than violence.
-
Every experience has its element of magic.
-
Without a mother, one cannot love. Without a mother, one cannot die.
-
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.
-
You've never lived what you are thinking, and that isn't good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.
-
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.
-
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.
-
All men of goodwill have this in common - that our works put us to shame.
-
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.
-
When two cultures collide is the only time when true suffering exists.
-
Love is like death. It is fulfillment and an evening after which nothing more may follow.
-
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.
-
What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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!
-
I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.
-
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.
-
In the beginning was the myth.
-
Whither will my path yet lead me? This path is stupid, it goes in spirals, perhaps in circles, but whichever way it goes, I will follow it.
-
Loneliness is the way by which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself.
-
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.
-
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.