Hermann Hesse Quotes
And here is a doctrine at which you will laugh. It seems to me, Govinda, that love is the most important thing in the world.
Nevertheless, whether in occurrences lasting days, hours or mere minutes at a time, I have experienced happiness often, and have had brief encounters with it in my later years, even in old age.
Among mathematicians, even in those days, the reputation of being a good Glass Bead Game player meant a great deal; it was equivalent to being a very good mathematician.
At one time I had given much thought to why men were so very rarely capable of living for an ideal. Now I saw that many, no, all men were capable of dying for one.
That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged — to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony.
All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?
To die is to go into the Collective Unconscious, to lose oneself in order to be transformed into form, pure form.
When we hate a person, what we hate in his image is something inside ourselves. Whatever isn't inside us can't excite us.
One cannot apologize for something fundamental, and a child feels and knows this as well and as deeply as any sage.
Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One's born and at once one is guilty.
So you find yourself surrounded by death and horror in the world, and you escape it into lust. But lust has no duration; it leaves you again in the desert.
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.
It is a pity that you students aren't fully aware of the luxury and abundance in which you live.
It was the first rent in the holy image of my father, it was the first fissure in the columns that had upheld my childhood, which every individual must destroy before he can become himself.
The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life.
Everything that was not suffered to the end and finally concluded, recurred, and the same sorrows were undergone.
You learned people and artists have, no doubt, all sorts of superior things in your heads; but you're human beings like the rest of us, and we, too, have our dreams and fancies.
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!
... let us recall the well-known statement of a university professor in the Republic of the Massagetes: 'Not the faculty but His Excellency the General can properly determine the sum of two and two.'
In every truth, the opposite is equally true. For example, a truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is onesided.
The world was beautiful when looked at in this way-without any seeking, so simple, so childlike.
Remember this: one can be a strict logician or grammarian and at the same time full of imagination and music.
The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life.
In any case, the most lively young people become the best old people, not those who pretend to be as wise as grandfathers while they are still at school.
One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too.
Every important cultural gesture comes down to a morality, a model for human behavior concentrated into a gesture.
He saw that the water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new.
Love can be begged, bought, or received as a gift, one can find it in the street, but one cannot steal it.
To nobody can you communicate in words and teachings, what happened to you in your hour of enlightenment.
Every natural form is latent within us, originates in the soul whose essence is eternity, whose essence we cannot know but which most often intimates itself to us as the power to love and create.
I believe that the struggle against death, the unconditional and self-willed determination to live, is the mode of power behind the lives and activities of all outstanding men.
