Hermann Hesse Quotes

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.

The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life.

Yes, what we are doing is probably mad, and probably it is good and necessary all the same. It is not a good thing when man overstrains his reason and tries to reduce to rational order matters that are susceptible of rational treatment. Then there arise ideals such as those of the Americans or of the Bolsheviks. Both are extraordinarily rational, and both lead to a frightful oppression and impoverishment of life, because they simplify it so crudely. The likeness of man, once a high ideal, is in process of becoming a machine-made article. It is for madmen like us, perhaps, to ennoble it again.

...and the vessel was not full, his intellect was not satisfied, his soul was not at peace, his heart was not still.

Every healthy person must have a goal in life and that life must have content.

One cannot apologize for something fundamental, and a child feels and knows this as well and as deeply as any sage.

You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.

All this had always been and he had never seen it; he was never present. Now he was present and belonged to it. Through his eyes he saw light and shadows; through his mind he was aware of moon and stars.

A house without books is a poor house, even if beautiful rugs are covering its floors and precious wallpapers and pictures cover its walls

Words can not express the joy of new life.

During deep meditation it is possible to dispel time, to see simultaneously all the past, present, and future, and then everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman.

When a writer receives praise or blame, when he arouses sympathy or is ridiculed, when he is loved or rejected, it is not on the strength of his thoughts and dreams as a whole, but only of that infinitesimal part which has been able to make its way through the narrow channel of language and the equally narrow channel of the reader's understanding.

Love must not entreat,' she added, 'or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract.

You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.

The best weapons against the infamies of life are courage, wilfulness and patience. Courage strenthens, wilfulness is fun and patience provides tranquility.

The truth is lived, not taught.

All it has experienced, tasted, suffered: The course of years, generations of animals, Oppression, recovery, friendship of sun and - Wind Will pour forth each day in the song Of its rustling foliage, in the friendly Gesture of its gently swaying crown, In the delicate sweet scent of resinous Sap moistening the sleep-glued buds, And the eternal game of lights and Shadows it plays with itself, content.

Toward seven o'clock every morning, I leave my study and step Out on the bright terrace; the sun already burns resplendent Between the shadows of the fig tree, makes the low wall of coarse Granite warm to the touch. Here my tools lie ready and waiting, Each one an intimate, an ally: the round basket for weeds: The zappetta, the small hoe with a short haft . . . There's a rake here as well, at at times a mattock and spade, Or two watering cans filled with water warmed by the sun. With my basket and small hoe in hand, facing the sun, I Go out for my morning walk.

What is the holding of breath? It is a flight from the Self, it is a temporary escape from the torment of Self. It is a temporary palliative against the pain and folly of life.

For mountain and stream, tree and leaf, root and blossom, every form in nature is echoed in us and originates in the soul whose being is eternity and is hidden from us but none the less gives itself to us for the most part in the power of love and creation.

I am much inclined to live from my rucksack, and let my trousers fray as they like.

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.

Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists of putting too high a value on time. In eternity there is no time. Eternity is a moment, just long enough for a joke

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.

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.

Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others.

So she thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it. She taught him that after a celebration of love the lovers should not part without admiring each other, without being conquered or having conquered, so that neither is bleak or glutted or has the bad feeling of being used or misused.

He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships become newly born. Each one was mortal, a passionate, painful example of all that is transitory. Yet none of them died, they only changed, were always reborn, continually had a new face: only time stood between one face and another.

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.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

It is good to taste for yourself everything you need to know. That worldly pleasures and wealth are not good things, I learned even as a child. I knew it for a long time, but only now have I experienced it.

The world, as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish — and it will.

...As every one of us knows, there are some festivals and games in which everything goes right, and every element lifts up, animates, and exalts every other, just as there are theatrical and musical performances which without any clearly discernible cause seem to ascend miraculously to glorious climaxes and intensely felt experiences, whereas others, just as well prepared, remain no more than decent tries.

People know, or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the world of mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer's slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue.

The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes almost arrogant. You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine's Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world's puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies.

Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.

We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.

Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism.

All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?

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.

Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Samsara and Nirvana, illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real.

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.

Each man carries the vestiges of his birth; the slime and eggshells of his primeval past with him to the end of his days. Some never become human, remaining frog, lizard, ant. Some are human above the waist, fish below.

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?

She stood a moment before my eyes, clearly and painfully, loved and deeply woven into my destiny; then fell away again in a deep oblivion, at a half regretted distance.

At the first kiss I felt something melt inside me that hurt in an exquisite way. All my longings, all my dreams and sweet anguish, all the secrets that slept deep within me came awake, everything was transformed and enchanted, and everything made sense.

The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer's voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death.

For a while I shall still be leaving, looking back at you as you slip away into the magic islands of the mind. But for a while now all are alive, believing that in a single poignant hour we did say all that we could ever say in a great flowing out of radiant power. It was like seeing and then going blind.