Quote

An enlightened man had but one duty - to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led.

Hermann Hesse

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Hermann Hesse
Age: 85 †
Born: 1877
Born: July 2
Died: 1962
Died: August 9
Illustrator
Literary
Novelist
Painter
Philosopher
Poet
Resistance Fighter
Writer
Hermann Karl Hesse
Seek
Reach
Forward
Duty
Demian
Matter
Grope
Way
Enlightened
Men
Certainty
Inner

More quotes by Hermann Hesse

Image
I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.
Hermann Hesse
Image
...and gradually his face assumed the expressions which are so often found among rich people - the expressions of discontent, of sickliness, of displeasure, of idleness, of lovelessness. Slowly the soul sickness of the rich crept over him.
Hermann Hesse
Image
A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to committ outrages.
Hermann Hesse
Image
To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.
Hermann Hesse
Image
I suddenly saw how sad and artificial my life had been during this period, for the loves, friends, habits and pleasures of these years were discarded like badly fitting clothes. I parted from them without pain and all that remained was to wonder that I could have endured them so long.
Hermann Hesse
Image
The bourgeois today burns as heretics and hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments tomorrow.
Hermann Hesse
Image
What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world.
Hermann Hesse
Image
People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest. It was a scandal that a breed of fearless and sinister people ran around freely, so they attached a nickname and a myth to these people to get even with them, to make up for the many times they had felt afraid.
Hermann Hesse
Image
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.
Hermann Hesse
Image
I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.
Hermann Hesse
Image
Happiness is love, nothing else.
Hermann Hesse
Image
So wie die Verruecktheit in einem hoeheren Sinn, der Anfang aller Weisheit ist, so ist die Schizophrenie der Anfang aller Kunst, aller Phantasie. (As insanity in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizophrenia the beginning of all art, all fantasy.)
Hermann Hesse
Image
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.
Hermann Hesse
Image
I believe that the struggle against death, the unconditional and self-willed determination to live, is the mode of power behind the lives and activities of all outstanding men.
Hermann Hesse
Image
For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.
Hermann Hesse
Image
You learned people and artists have, no doubt, all sorts of superior things in your heads but you're human beings like the rest of us, and we, too, have our dreams and fancies.
Hermann Hesse
Image
The voices of all creatures are in the voices of the river.
Hermann Hesse
Image
Love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is only your aversion to it that hurts, nothing else.
Hermann Hesse
Image
The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life.
Hermann Hesse
Image
One cannot apologize for something fundamental, and a child feels and knows this as well and as deeply as any sage.
Hermann Hesse