Hermann Hesse quotes - page 2

You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live. (Hermann Hesse)
Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. View quote
Hermann Hesse
I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult? View quote
Hermann Hesse
Abraxas was the god who was both god and devil. View quote
Hermann Hesse
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. View quote
Hermann Hesse
I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back. View quote
Hermann Hesse
We create gods and struggle with them, and they bless us. View quote
Hermann Hesse
Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. View quote
Hermann Hesse
That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged - to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony. View quote
Hermann Hesse
Young people have many pleasures and many sorrows, because they only have themselves to think of, so every wish and every notion assume importance; every pleasure is tasted to the full, but also every sorrow, and many who find that their wishes cannot be fulfilled, immediately put an end to their lives. View quote
Hermann Hesse
The world, as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish - and it will. (Hermann Hesse)
Without a mother, one cannot love. Without a mother, one cannot die. View quote
Hermann Hesse
I had grown a thin mustache, I was a full-grown man, and yet I was completely helpless and without a goal in life. View quote
Hermann Hesse
Passion is always a mystery and unaccountable, and unfortunately there is no doubt that life does not spare its purest children and often it is just the most deserving people who cannot help loving those that destroy them. View quote
Hermann Hesse
Like one who has eaten and drunk too much and vomits painfully, and then feels better, so did the restless man wish he could rid himself with one terrific heave of these pleasures, of these habits of this entirely senseless life. View quote
Hermann Hesse
Love does not entreat; or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract. View quote
Hermann Hesse
Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure. View quote
Hermann Hesse
In the beginning was the myth. God, in his search for self-expression, invested the souls of Hindus, Greeks, and Germans with poetic shapes and continues to invest each child's soul with poetry every day. View quote
Hermann Hesse
I was given the freedom to discover my own inclination and talents, to fashion my inmost pleasures and sorrows myself and to regard the future not as an alien higher power but as the hope and product of my own strength. View quote
Hermann Hesse
Was that really love? I saw all these passionate people reel about and drift haphazardly as if driven by a storm, the man filled with desire today, satiated on the morrow, loving fiercely and discarding brutally, sure of no affection and happy in no love... View quote
Hermann Hesse
I live in my dreams - that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference. (Hermann Hesse)
There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge - that is everywhere, that is Atman, that is in me and you and in every creature, and I am beginning to believe that this knowledge has no worse enemy than the man of knowledge, than learning. View quote
Hermann Hesse
Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One's born at once one is guilty. View quote
Hermann Hesse
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. View quote
Hermann Hesse
The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment, every sin already carries grace in it. View quote
Hermann Hesse