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The opposite of every truth is just as true! That's like this: any truth can only be expressed and put into words when it is one-sided. Everything is… - Hermann Hesse
" "The opposite of every truth is just as true! That's like this: any truth can only be expressed and put into words when it is one-sided. Everything is one-sided which can be thought with thoughts and said with words, it's all one-sided, all just one half, all lacks completeness, roundness, oneness. When the exalted Gotama spoke in his teachings of the world, he had to divide it into Sansara and Nirvana, into deception and truth, into suffering and salvation. It cannot be done differently, there is no other way for him who wants to teach. But the world itself, what exists around us and inside of us, is never one-sided. A person or an act is never entirely Sansara or entirely Nirvana, a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful. It does really seem like this, because we are subject to deception, as if time was something real. Time is not real, Govinda, I have experienced this often and often again. And if time is not real, then the gap which seems to be between the world and the eternity, between suffering and blissfulness, between evil and good, is also a deception.
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About Hermann Hesse
Hermann Karl Hesse (2 July 1877 – 9 August 1962) was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. His most famous works include Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game (also known as Magister Ludi) all of which explore an individual's search for spirituality.
Biography information from Wikiquote
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Native Name:
Hermann Karl Hesse
Alternative Names:
Hh. Hesse
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Herman Hesse
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Additional quotes by Hermann Hesse
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
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