Tao Te Ching
Hermann Hesse
1877 – 1962 CE
Guiding light for a world-wide cultural transition, spiritual teacher to the Beat generation, poet at heart and in life, soul of his age; Hesse was expelled from a Protestant seminary, denounced by the German media when he protested German’s involvement during WWI, and his books were banned and destroyed by Hitler. The 20th century’s most widely read European author, his books personify the balance between freedom and equality, the individual and society and the integration of opposites extolled by the non-thought lineages. After writing Nobel Prize-winning book, The Glass Bead Game, he devoted his life to mentoring young people and collaborating with peers like Thomas Mann and Carl Jung. He wrote over 30,000 letters to hundreds of different correspondents
Eras
Western
Post-Romantic Age (1850 – 2018 CE)Gilded Age (1860 – 1900 CE)
Great Depression (1929 – 1941 CE)
Victorian (1837 – 1901 CE)
Roaring Twenties (1920 – 1929 CE)
Chinese
Qing dynasty (1644 – 1912 CE)Sources
Unlisted Sources
Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte
Glass Bead Game
Knulp
Speeches of Buddha (1921)
Quotes by Hermann Hesse (50 quotes)
“"When someone seeks," said Siddhartha, "then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal."”
from Siddhartha
Chapters:
26. The Still Rule the Restless
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“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.”
Chapters:
24. Unnecessary Baggage
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“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.”
Chapters:
2. The Wordless Teachings
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“I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference.”
from Demian
Chapters:
18. The Sick Society
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“Some of us think holding on makes us strong but sometimes it is letting go.”
Chapters:
57. Wu Wei
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“Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them.”
Chapters:
65. Simplicity: the Hidden Power of Goodness
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“What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.”
Chapters:
81. Journey Without Goal
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“When we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home, that is happiness.”
Chapters:
66. Go Low
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“Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else”
from Siddhartha
Chapters:
41. Distilled Life
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“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.”
Chapters:
56. One with the Dust
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“Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.”
from Steppenwolf
Chapters:
27. No Trace
63. Easy as Hard
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“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.”
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“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.”
from Gertrude
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“Let yourself be carried away, like the clouds in the sky. You shouldn’t resist. God exists in your destiny just as much as he does in these mountains and in that lake.”
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“If one does not take the verses of the New Testament as being commandments, but as expressions of an extraordinary awareness of the secrets of our soul, then the wisest word ever spoken is: 'Love thy neighbor as thyself.’”
Chapters:
63. Easy as Hard
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“I didn't know that being religious meant health and cheerfulness.”
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“I began to think of reincarnation as a manifestation of stability amidst flux, of continuity in tradition, of intellectual life, of individual life that transcends time”
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“Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”
from Siddhartha
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“I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.”
from Siddhartha
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“We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.”
from Siddhartha
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“one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure. Every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it.”
from Siddhartha
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“after a celebration of love the lovers should not part without admiring each other, without being conquered or having conquered, so that neither is bleak or glutted or has the bad feeling of being used or misused.”
from Siddhartha
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“It is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.”
from Siddhartha
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“My real self wanders elsewhere, far away, wanders on and on invisibly and has nothing to do with my life.”
from Siddhartha
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“Opinions mean nothing; they may be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can embrace or reject them.”
from Siddhartha
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“One can beg, buy, be presented with and find love in the streets, but it can never be stolen.”
from Siddhartha
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“Siddhartha determined to no longer be instructed by any doctrine whatsoever and said, ‘I shall learn from myself, be a pupil of myself; I shall get to know myself, the mystery of Siddhartha.’ He then looked around as if he were seeing the world for the first time.”
from Siddhartha
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“If a beautiful thing were to remain beautiful for all eternity, I'd be glad, but all the same I'd look at it with a colder eye. I'd say to myself: You can look at it any time, it doesn't have to be today.”
from Knulp
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“You’ve never lived what you are thinking, and that isn’t good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.”
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“Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.”
from Steppenwolf
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“Buddha accomplished a training for himself and his pupils, exercised a discipline, set up a goal, and produced results before which even the genuine heroes of European action can only feel awe... if we allow Buddha to speak to us as vision, as image, as the awakened one, the perfect one, we find him, almost independently of the philosophic content and dogmatic kernel of his teachings, a great prototype of mankind.”
from Speeches of Buddha (1921)
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“There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.”
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“Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have at the last to take the whole world into your soul, cost what it may.”
from Steppenwolf
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“That man is not yet a finished creation but rather a challenge of the spirit; a distant possibility dreaded as much as desired... He is an experiment and a transition. He is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit.”
from Steppenwolf
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“The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask the same illusion the the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen.”
from Steppenwolf
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“He is resolved to forget that the desperate clinging to the self, and the desperate clinging to life are the surest way to eternal death.”
from Steppenwolf
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“Without really wanting to at all, they pay calls and carry on conversations, sit out their hours at desks and on office chairs; and it is all compulsory, mechanical and against the grain, and it could all be done or left undone just as well by machines... the stupidity and shallowness, the hopeless tragedy and waste of the lives they lead.”
from Steppenwolf
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“No one will ever attain redemption through doctrine!”
from Siddhartha
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“Everyone's life is a journey to themselves. Though none have attained self-realization, all strive for it—some plodding, some with less effort, but all as best they can. Each of us caries the remains of our birth—slime and eggshells—with us to the end.”
from Demian
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“The ideal man of the Karamazovs loves nothing and everything, does nothing and everything. He is primeval matter, monstrous soul-stuff. He cannot live in this form; he can only pass on... He reaches forth beyond prohibitions, beyond natural instinct, beyond morality.”
from Demian
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“When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.”
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“the Glass Bead Game... As an idea we find it already performed in earlier ages, e.g. at Pythagoras. The same eternal Idea was the basis of every movement of the mind towards the ideal goal of a Universitas Litterarum, of every Platonic Academy, of any congregation of a spiritual elite, every attempt to approximate the exact and the free sciences, every attempt to reconcile science and art and the art of science and religion.”
from Glass Bead Game
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“This same eternal idea, which for us has been embodied in the Glass Bead Game, has underlain every movement of Mind toward the ideal goal of a Universitatis Litterarum, every Platonic Academy, every league of an intellectual elite, every rapprochement between the exact and the more liberal disciplines, every effort toward reconciliation between science and art or science and religion.”
from Glass Bead Game
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“he has the secret of those people to whom success comes by itself... he never fears failure, he is never worried about a loss.”
from Siddhartha
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“In the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.”
from Glass Bead Game
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“Every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge.”
from Glass Bead Game
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“The doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. ... The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.”
from Glass Bead Game
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“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.”
from Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte
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“Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.”
from Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte
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“The true profession of a man is to find his way to himself.”
from Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte
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Quotes about Hermann Hesse (4 quotes)
“Considered as a whole, Hesse's achievement can hardly be matched in modern literature... Hesse has little imagination in the sense that Shakespeare or Tolstoy can be said to have imagination, but his ideas have a vitality that more than makes up for it. Before all, he is a novelist who used the novel to explore the problem: What should we do with our lives? The man who is interested to know how he should live instead of merely taking life as it comes, is automatically an Outsider.”
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“Few writers have chronicled with such dispassionate lucidity and fearless honesty the progress of the soul through the states of life.”
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“His work raises the familiar to a new, spiritual level, which may be termed revolutionary, not in a direct political or social, but in a psychological, poetic sense; it is truly and authentically open and sensitive to the future.”
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“the complete integrity of Hesse’s self-absorption is what guarantees the permanence of his work. As long as people struggle with the need to be themselves, and the difficulty of doing so, he will be a living presence—which is even better, perhaps, than being a great writer”
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