Hermann Hesse Quotes
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I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me.
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The art of love-giving and taking become one.
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You can ride, you can travel with a friend of your own; The final step you must take alone. No wisdom is better than this when known: That every hard thing is done alone.
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When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.
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You must find your dream, then the way becomes easy.
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Romantic souvenirs had a way of attaching themselves to one when one wanted to move on, but they were not to be taken seriously.
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Knowledge can be conveyed, but not wisdom. It can be found, it can be lived, it is possible to be carried by it, miracles can be performed with it, but it cannot be expressed in words and taught.
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Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism.
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To such men the desperate and horrible thought has come that perhaps the whole of human life is but a bad joke, a violent and ill-fated abortion of the primal mother, a savage and dismal catastophe of nature.
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Only within yourself exists the other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul.
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You're quite right there," he said. "I have practiced abstinence myself for years, and had my time of fasting, too, but now I find myself once more beneath the sign of Aquarius, a dark and humid constellation.
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You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing.
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Man is not by any means of fixed and enduring form (this, in spite of suspicions to the contrary on the part of their wise men, was the ideal of the ancients). He is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit. His innermost destiny drives him on to the spirit and to God. His innermost longing draws him back to nature, the mother. Between the two forces his life hangs tremulous and irresolute.
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Thus Gotama [Buddha] walked toward the town to gather alms, and the two samanas recognized him solely by the perfection of his repose, by the calmness of his figure, in which there was no trace of seeking, desiring, imitating, or striving, only light and peace.
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Whether you and I and a few others will renew the world some day remains to be seen. But within ourselves we must renew it each day.
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One of the disadwantages of school and learning, he thought dreamily, was that the mind seemed to have the tendency too see and represent all things as though they were flat and had only two dimensions. This, somehow, seemed to render all matters of intellect shallow and worthless.
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Everything that was not suffered to the end and finally concluded, recurred, and the same sorrows were undergone.
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The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.
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The tree does not die, it waits.
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The highest art... sets down its creations and trusts in their magic, without fear of not being understood.
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My real self wanders elsewhere, far away, wanders on and on invisibly and has nothing to do with my life.
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The world, as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish — and it will.
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"You do not really love me — you love nobody. Is that not true?" "Maybe," said Siddhartha wearily. "I am like you. You cannot love either, otherwise how could you practice love as an art? Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can — that is their secret."
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I called the world of phenomena an illusion, I called my eyes and my tongue an accident, valueless phenomena. No, that is all over; I have awakened, I have really awakened and I have just been born today.