J.F Hermann Quotes

So you can't dance? Not at all? Not even one step? How can you say that you've taken any trouble to live when you won't even dance?

He has robbed me, yet he has given me something of greater value . . . he has given to me myself.

Good that you ask. You should always ask, always have doubts.

... numbers have neither substance, nor meaning, nor qualities. They are nothing but marks, and all that is in them we have put into them by the simple rule of straight succession.

The gene as the basis of life.

There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.

Romantic souvenirs had a way of attaching themselves to one when one wanted to move on, but they were not to be taken seriously.

What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you're searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don't find the time for finding?

He had loved and he had found himself. Most people love to lose themselves.

Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.

The smallest quantity of alcohol scares away novel ideas.

What we see is the solution to a computational problem, our brains compute the most likely causes from the photon absorptions within our eyes.

The truth has a million faces, but there is only one truth.

I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am responsible for what I do with the life I've got.

Dreams and restless thoughts came flowing to him from the river, from the twinkling stars at night, from the sun's melting rays. Dreams and a restlessness of the soul came to him.

A poem is learned by heart and then not again repeated. We will suppose that after a half year it has been forgotten: no effort of recollection is able to call it back again into consciousness.

In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified.

One who hates is a man holding a magnifying-glass, and when he hates someone, he knows precisely that person's surface, from the soles of his feet all the way up to each hair on the hated head

Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else.

Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goals, if he is able to think, if he is able to wait, if he is able to fast.

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

All life was a breath exhaled by God. All dying was a breath inhaled by God.

Chaos demands to be recognized and experienced before letting itself be converted into a new order.

Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence

The goddess of beauty is the goddess Kitsch.

Mathematics has the inhuman quality of starlight, brilliant and sharp, but cold.

The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been given back to me today by this friend of mine who taught me dancing.

One must find the source within one's own Self, one must possess it. Everything else was seeking -- a detour, an error.

Alas, Siddhartha, I see you suffering, but you're suffering a pain at which one would like to laugh, at which you'll soon laugh for yourself.

No permanence is ours, we are a wave that flows to fit whatever form it finds.

I want to learn from myself, want to be my student, want to get to know myself, the secret of Siddhartha.

Love is like death. It is fulfillment and an evening after which nothing more may follow.

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves.

A mere nothing suffices — and the lightning strikes.

To be happy is not the purpose of our being, but to deserve happiness.

The art of love-giving and taking become one.

The river is everywhere at the same time . . . everywhere and the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future.

Each man's life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself.

Happiness is love, nothing else.

Before one can generalize, formalize, and axiomatize, there must be a mathematical substance.

His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands and thousands.

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.

Om is the bow, the arrow is soul.

My goal is this: always to put myself in the place in which I am best able to serve, wherever my gifts and qualities find the best soil to grow, the widest field of action. There is no other goal.

It taught him how to listen -- how to listen with a quiet heart and a waiting soul, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgment, without opinion.

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers.

Black is real sensation, even if it is produced by entire absence of light. The sensation of black is distinctly different from the lack of all sensations.

Opinions mean nothing; they may be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can embrace or reject them.

More paper money cannot make a society richer, of course, it is just more printed-paper. Otherwise why is it that there are still poor countries and poor people around?

Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?