Hermann Hesse Quotes

Within Siddhartha there slowly grew and ripened the knowledge of what wisdom really was and the goal of his long seeking. It was nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.

This thought matured in him slowly, and it was reflected in Vasudeva's old childlike face: harmony, knowledge of the eternal perfection of the world, and unity.

Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.

الألم وألوان الخيبة والكآبة لا توجد لتحزننا ولتجردنا من القيمة والكرامة، وإنما وجدت لتزيدنا نضجاً وصفاءً

الأفكار التي نعيشها هي وحدها التي لها قيمة.

There were now and then, though rarely, the hours that brought the welcome shock, pulled down the walls and brought me back again from my wanderings to the living heart of the world. Sadly and yet deeply moved, I set myself to recall the last of these experiences. It was at a concert of lovely old music. After two of three notes of the piano the door was opened of a sudden to the other world. I sped through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defenses and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart.

"No road will bring us together."

"Don't speak like that."

"I'm serious. We are not meant to come together, not any more than sun and moon were meant to come together, or sea and land. We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. 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."

The cup was emptied and would never be filled again.

When a tree is polled, it will sprout new shoots nearer its roots. A soul that is ruined in the bud will frequently return to the springtime of its beginnings and its promise-filled childhood, as though it could discover new hopes there and retie the broken threads of life. The shoots grow rapidly and eagerly, but it is only a sham life that will never be a genuine tree.

They had sat discussing astrology, a forbidden science, and not pursued in the cloister. Narziss had said that it was a striving to order and arrange after their kinds the many diverse sorts of human beings, their predestined character and their fates,
Here Goldmund broke into his words. ‘You speak of nothing but differences! I have slowly begun to see that they form your own particular whimsey. When you speak of this great difference between us I always feel that it lies in nothing, save in your own strange hankering to find differences.’ Narziss: ‘Right. You have hit the nail on the head. That is what I mean - that to you differences mean little, while to me they are the most important things. Mine is the nature of a scholar, and my branch of scholarship is science. And science, to quote your own words, is nothing else than a “strange hankering after differences”. Her essence could not be better defined. For men of science nothing is so important, as the clear definition of differences. To find, for instance, on every man, those signs which mark him off from all other men: that is to know him.’ Goldmund : ‘But how? One has peasant’s shoes and is a peasant; another a crown on his head, and is a king. There are your differences! But these are seen by children, without, any science.’ Narziss; ‘Yet when peasant and king are clad alike children can no longer distinguish between them.’ Ch. IV

Our Journey to the East and our League, the basis of our community, has been the most important thing, indeed the only important thing in my life, compared with which my own individual life has appeared completely unimportant. And now that I want to hold fast to and describe this most important thing, or at least something of it, everything is only a mass of separate fragmentary pictures which has been reflected in something, and this something is myself, and this self, this mirror, whenever I have gazed into it, has proved to be nothing but the upper- most surface of a glass plane. I put my pen away with the sincere intention and hope of continuing tomorrow or some other time, or rather to begin anew, but at the back of my intention and hope, at the back of my really tremendous urge to relate our story, there remains a dreadful doubt. It is the doubt that arose during the search for Leo in the valley of Morbio. This doubt does not only ask the question, “ Is your story capable of being told ? ” It also asks the question, “ Was it possible to experience it ? ” We recall examples of participants in the World War who, although by no means short of facts and attested stories, must at times have entertained the same doubts. p. 40

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.

You knew all along that your sanctioned world was only half the world, and you tried to suppress the other half the same way the priests and teachers do. You won't succeed. No one succeeds in this once he has begun to think.

In my brain were stored a thousand pictures.

It is extremely beautiful to belong to a woman, to give yourself. Don’t laugh if I sound foolish. But to love a woman, you see, to abandon yourself to her, to absorb her completely and feel absorbed by her, that is not what you call ‘being in love,’ which you mock a little. For me it is the road to life, the way toward the meaning of life.

The true profession of a man is to find his way to himself.