Hermann Hesse Zitate

seite 5

„Gegen die Infamitäten des Lebens sind die besten Waffen: Tapferkeit, Eigensinn und Geduld. Die Tapferkeit stärkt, der Eigensinn macht Spaß und die Geduld gibt Ruhe.“

„Nun, aller höhere Humor fängt damit an, daß man die eigene Person nicht mehr ernst nimmt.“

„Wohin noch mag mein Weg mich führen? Närrisch ist er, dieser Weg, er geht in Schleifen, er geht vielleicht im Kreise. Mag er gehen, wie er will, ich will ihn gehen.“

„Der Tag war vergangen, wie eben die Tage so vergehen; ich hatte ihn herumgebracht, hatte ihn sanft umgebracht.“

„Wenn wir einen Menschen hassen, so hassen wir in seinem Bild etwas, was in uns selber sitzt. Was nicht in uns selber ist, das regt uns nicht auf.“

„Die Jugend hört auf mit dem Egoismus, das Alter beginnt mit dem Leben für andere.“

„Ich wollte ja nichts als das zu leben versuchen, was von selber aus mir heraus wollte. Warum war das so schwer?“

„Unsere Aufgabe als Menschen ist: Innerhalb unseres eigenen, einmaligen, persönlichen Lebens einen Schritt weiter zu tun vom Tier zum Menschen.“

„Lob macht schlechte Menschen noch schlechter und gute unerträglich.“

„Wenn ich nicht im Grunde ein sehr arbeitsamer Mensch wäre, wie wäre ich je auf die Idee gekommen, Loblieder und Theorien des Müßiggangs auszudenken. Die geborenen, die genialen Müßiggänger tun dergleichen nie.“

„Gegner bedürfen einander oft mehr als Freunde, denn ohne Wind gehen keine Mühlen.“

„Es ist mit dem Lesen wie mit jedem anderen Genusse: er wird stets desto tiefer und nachhaltiger sein, je inniger und liebevoller wir uns ihm hingeben. Man muß seine Bücher als Freunde und Lieblinge behandeln, jedes in seiner Eigenart schätzen und nichts von ihm verlangen, was dieser Eigenart fremd ist.“

„Theorie ist Wissen, das nicht funktioniert. Praxis ist, wenn alles funktioniert und man weiß nicht warum.“

„Na, wozu Lärm machen und die Leute beunruhigen!“

„Damit das Mögliche entsteht, muß immer wieder das Unmögliche versucht werden.“

„Der Aphorismus ist so etwas wie ein Edelstein, der durch Seltenheit an Wert gewinnt und nur in winzigen Dosen ein Genuß ist“

„Es ist nicht gut, wenn die Menschheit den Verstand überanstrengt und Dinge mit Hilfe der Vernunft zu ordnen sucht, die der Vernunft noch noch garnicht zugänglich sind.“

“For guarding us and helping us to live.”

“In the German spirit the matriarchal link with nature rules in the form of the hegemony of music to an extent unknown in any other people.”

“They knew a tremendous number of things — But was it worthwhile knowing all these things if they did not know the one important thing, the only important thing?”

“A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self”

“Haller’s sickness of soul, as I now know, is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs, a sickness, it seems, that by no means attacks the weak and worthless only but rather those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts.”

“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.”

“Since life may summon us at every age”

“A true seeker could not accept any teachings, not if he sincerely wished to find something. But he who had found, could give his approval to every path, every goal; nothing separated him from all of the other thousands who lived in eternity, who breathed the Divine.”

“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.”

“Without a mother, one cannot love. Without a mother, one cannot die.”

“So every virtue, so our grasp of truth”

“Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One's born at once one is guilty.”

“There were entertaining, impassioned, or witty lectures on Goethe, say, in which he would be depicted descending from a post chaise wearing a blue frock-coat to seduce some Strassburg or Wetzlar girl; or on Arabic culture; in all of them a number of fashionable phrases were shaken up like dice in a cup and everyone was delighted if he dimly recognized one or two catchwords.”

“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.”

“I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back.”

“That's the way it is when you love. It makes you suffer, and I have suffered much in the years since. But it matters little that you suffer, so long as you feel alive with a sense of the close bond that connects all living things, so long as love does not die!”

“Ordinarily, when he thought back upon those days, let alone upon his student years and the Bamboo Grove, it had always been as if he were gazing from a cool, dull room out into broad, brightly sunlit landscapes, into the irrevocable past, the paradise of memory. Such recollections had always been, even when they were free of sadness, a vision of things remote and different, separated from the prosaic present by a mysterious festiveness.”

“I had grown a thin mustache, I was a full-grown man, and yet I was completely helpless and without a goal in life.”

“The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been given back to me today by this friend of mine who taught me dancing.”

“As every flower fades and as all youth”

“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.”

“All existence seemed to be based on duality, on contrast. Either one was a man or one was a woman, either a wanderer or sedentary burgher, either a thinking person or a feeling person-no one could breathe in at the same time as he breathed out, be a man as well as a woman, experience freedom as well as order, combine instinct and mind. One always had to pay for one with the loss of the other, and one thing was always just as important and desirable as the other.”

“Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor”

“Sadness when there should be Joy, hatred when there should be love show compassion because we can be more because we both have scars and pain that no one will ever understand but us so be with me not against me and bring us where we were happy and free.”

“No, I'm not religious I'm sorry to say. There is no time now to be religious.”

“When an orchestra of the Journeyers first publicly performed a suite from the time before Handel completely without crescendi and diminuendi, with the naïveté and chasteness of another age and world, some among the audience are said to have been totally uncomprehending, but others listened with fresh attention and had the impression that they were hearing music for the first time in their lives. In the League's concert hall between Bremgarten and Morbio, one member built a Bach organ as perfectly as Johann Sebastian Bach would have had it built had he had the means and opportunity.”

“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.”

“Be ready bravely and without remorse”

“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…”