Hermann Hesse Quotes
-
Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.
-
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.
-
Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism.
-
To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.
-
Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.
-
Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One's born and at once one is guilty.
-
The art of love-giving and taking become one.
-
Therefore, I see whatever exists as good, death is to me like life, sin like holiness, wisdom like foolishness, everything has to be as it is, everything only requires my consent, only my willingness, my loving agreement, to be good for me, to do nothing but work for my benefit, to be unable to ever harm me.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me.
-
You have to try the impossible to achieve the possible.
-
Everything that was not suffered to the end and finally concluded, recurred, and the same sorrows were undergone.
-
The highest art... sets down its creations and trusts in their magic, without fear of not being understood.
-
The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.
-
You must find your dream, then the way becomes easy.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The tree does not die, it waits.
-
The world, as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish — and it will.
-
They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.
-
"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."
-
You should not take old people who are already dead seriously. It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don't mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
-
Everyone gives what he has. The soldier gives strength, the merchant goods, the teacher instruction, the farmer rice, the fisherman fish.