Hermann Hesse Quotations

So you can't dance? Not at all? Not even one step? How can you say that you've taken any trouble to live when you won't even dance?

Passion is always a mystery and unaccountable, and unfortunately there is no doubt that life does not spare its purest children; often it is just the most deserving people who cannot help loving those that destroy them.

Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain-that it may perhaps be this is not important-but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the small from the same stream, from the same law of cause, of becoming and dying.

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.

The river is everywhere at the same time . . . everywhere and the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future.

I am much inclined to live from my rucksack, and let my trousers fray as they like.

Making music together is the best way for two people to become friends.

Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try again and again to console my heart and pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell.

Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.

People know, or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the world of mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer's slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue.