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Hermann Hesse
177 quotes
“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.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of desired imaginary world, some imaginary vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, to love it and be glad to belong to it. These, Govinda, are some of the thoughts in my mind.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Here is a doctrine at which you will laugh. It seems to me, Govinda, that Love is the most important thing in the world. It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As for others and the world around him he never ceased in his heroic and earnest endeavor to love them, to be just to them, to do them no harm, for the love of his neighbor was as deeply in him as the hatred of himself, and so his whole life was an example that love of one's neighbor is not possible without love of one's self, and that self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wait a moment, here I have it. This: 'Most men will not swim before they are able to.' Is not that witty? Naturally, they won't swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they won't think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what's more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Haller’s sickness of soul, as I now know, is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs, a sickness, it seems, that by no means attacks the weak and worthless only but rather those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I sped through heaven and saw god at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defences and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“MAGIC THEATER ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY I tried to open the door, but the heavy old latch would not stir. The display too was over. It had suddenly ceased, sadly convinced of its uselessness. I took a few steps back, landing deep into the mud, but no more letters came. The display was over. For a long time I stood waiting in the mud, but in vain. Then, when I had given up and gone back to the alley, a few colored letters were dropped here and there, reflected on the asphalt in front of me. I read: FOR MADMEN ONLY!”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How foolish to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! 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.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These persons all have two souls, two beings within them. There is God and the devil in them; the mother's blood and the father's; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the wolf and man in Harry.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He gained strength through familiarity with the thought that the emergency exit stood always open and became curious, too, to taste his suffering to the dregs. If it went too badly with him he could feel sometimes with a grim malicious pleasure: “I am curious to see all the same just how much man can endure. If the limit of what is bearable is reached, I have only to open the door to escape.” There are a great many suicides to which this thought imparts a common strength.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now what we call “bourgeois,” when regarded as an element always to be found in human life, is nothing else than the search for a balance. It is the striving after a mean between the countless extremes and opposite that arise in human conduct.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The lone wolf who knows no peace, these victims of unceasing pain to whom the urge for tragedy has been denied and who can never break through the starry space, who feel themselves summoned thither and yet cannot survive in its atmosphere-for them is reserved, provided suffering has made their spirits rough and elastic enough, a way of reconcilement and an escape into humor. Humor has always something bourgeois in it, although the true bourgeois in capable of understanding it.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A thousand such possibilities await him. His fate brings them on, leaving him no choice; for those outside of the bourgeoisie live in the atmosphere of these magic possibilities. A mere nothing suffices — and the lightning strikes.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man is not by any means of fixed and enduring form (this, in spite of suspicious to the contrary on the part of their wise men, was the ideal of the ancients). He is much more an experiment and a transition. 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, and the mother. Between the two forces his life hangs tremulous and resolute.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self. Now the bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be). And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he does comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire. The bourgeois is consequently by nature a creature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and easy to rule.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Out whole civilization was a cemetery where Jesus Christ and Socrates, Mozart and Haydn, Dante and Goethe were but indecipherable names on moldering stones; and the mourners who stood round affecting a pretense of sorrow would give much to believe in these inscriptions which once were holy, or at least to utter one heart-felt word of grief and despair about this world that is no more. And nothing was left them but the embarrassed grimaces of a company round a grave.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All birth means separation from the All, the confinement within limitation, the separation from God, the pangs of being born ever anew. The return into the All, the dissolution of painful individuation, the reunion with God means the expansion of the soul until it is able once more to embrace the All.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Obeying is like eating and drinking. There's nothing like it if you've been without it too long”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No, I'm not religious I'm sorry to say. There is no time now to be religious.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the German spirit the matriarchal link with nature rules in the form of the hegemony of music to an extent unknown in any other people.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Instead of playing his part as truly and honestly as he could, the German intellectual has constantly rebelled against the word and against reason and courted wonderful creations of sound, and wonderful beauties of feeling and mood that were never pressed home to reality, has left the greater part of its practical gifts to decay. None of us intellectuals is at home in reality. We are strange to it and hostile. That is why the part played by intellect even in our own German reality, in our history and politics and public opinion, has be so lamentable a one.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All this, I said, just as today was the case with the beginnings of wireless, would be of no more service to man than as an escape from himself and his true aims, and a means of surrounding himself with an ever closer mesh of distractions and useless activities.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Your faith has found no more air to breathe. And suffocation is a hard death.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the first time I understood Goethe’s laughter, the laughter of the immortals. It was a laughter without an object. It was simply light and lucidity. It was that which is left over when a true man has passed through all the sufferings, vices, mistakes, passions, and misunderstandings of men and got through to eternity and the world of space. And eternity was nothing else than the redemption of time, its return to innocence, so to speak, and its transformation again to space.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not a good thing when man overstrains his reason and tries to reduce to rational order matters that are no susceptible of rational treatment. Then there are ideals such as those of the Americans or 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 machinemade article. It is for madmen like us, perhaps, to ennoble it again.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One's born at once one is guilty.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many generations of cloister schoolboys had trooped past beneath this stranger tree, laughing, gossiping, playing, squabbling, shod or barefoot, according to the season of the year; each with his writing-tablet; boys with a flower between their lips, boys cracking nuts, boys with snowballs. Always there were new ones; every second year brought its fresh faces, though most - tousled and yellow-haired - were very like the boys that had passed. Some stayed and turned into novices, then monks, and their yellow hair was shorn. Ch. I”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the cells and schoolrooms of the cloister, between the strong double redstone pillars and rounded arches, monks lived, taught, administered, studied, ruled. Every branch of science was pursued there, and inherited by each new generation: divine and worldly lore, the dark and the light.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Books were written and annotated, systems evolved, the writings of the ancients collected, missals illuminated, the people’s belief fostered, the people’s credulity smiled upon. Here there was all, and room for everything, belief and learning, depths and simplicity, the wisdom of the Greeks and the Evangelists, black magic and white - all had their uses.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was room for repentance and solitude; room for good living and company.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For a while the cloister of Mariabronn was renowned for its exorcists and devil-chasers; for a while for the beauty of its plain chaunt; then for a saintly father who healed and wrought miracles; then for its pike broth and stag’s liver pasty - each in its time.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of the many monks who had thronged the church, the dormitories and study-rooms, there were two, remarked by all, whom all were watching - Abbot Daniel and the teaching novice, Narziss, only recently entered in the novitiate, yet already, against all tradition, and because of his exceptional gifts, employed, in Greek especially, as a teacher. These two, the novice and the abbot, were respected and heeded by all the house. They were watched and aroused curiosity, admired and envied, slandered in secret. Ch. I”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My wish for you two young scholars is that you may never lack a superior whose wits are duller than your own. No salve for pride is better than that. Ch. I”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and complement. Ch. IV”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“‘I am not that wanton whose feet you stroked beneath the table. You seem only to know such women as that.’ ‘No, God be praised, you are far more beautiful, and finer.’‘That was not what I meant’‘No, but it is so. Do you know how beautiful you are?’‘I have my looking-glass.’ ‘Did you ever look and see your forehead in it, Lydia? And your shoulders and your little finger-nails; and then your knees? And have you seen how all these things belong to each other, how all has the same long, beautiful shape? Have you seen it?’ Ch IX”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All existence seemed to be based on duality, on contrast. Either one was a man or one was a woman, either a wanderer or sedentary burgher, either a thinking person or a feeling person-no one could breathe in at the same time as he breathed out, be a man as well as a woman, experience freedom as well as order, combine instinct and mind. One always had to pay for one with the loss of the other, and one thing was always just as important and desirable as the other.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How mysterious this life was, how deep and muddy its waters ran, yet how clear and noble what emerged from them.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One thing, however, did become clear to him [Goldmund] – why so many perfect works of art did not please him at all, why they were almost hateful and boring to him, in spite of a certain undeniable beauty. Workshops, churches, and palaces were full of these fatal works of art; he had even helped with a few himself. They were deeply disappointing because they aroused the desire for the highest and did not fulfill it. They lacked the most essential thing – mystery. That was what dreams and truly great works of art had in common: mystery.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I know what love is, it is because of you.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Goldmund smiled up into his eyes, with the new smile he had brought home from his travels, the smile which seemed so frail and old, uncertain, at times, and feeble-witted, and then again pure goodness and pure wisdom.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Without a mother, one cannot love. Without a mother, one cannot die.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source