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Hermann Hesse Quotes

Browse 46 quotes about Hermann Hesse.

Hermann Hesse Quotes

“Teachers dread nothing so much as unusual characteristics in precocious boys during the initial stages of their adolescence. A certain streak of genius makes an ominous impression on them, for there exists a deep gulf between genius and the teaching profession. Anyone with a touch of genius seems to his teachers a freak from the very first. As far as teachers are concerned, they define young geniuses as those who are bad, disrespectful, smoke at fourteen, fall in love at fifteen, can be found at sixteen hanging out in bars, read forbidden books, write scandalous essays, occasionally stare down a teacher in class, are marked in the attendance book as rebels, and are budding candidates for room-arrest. A schoolmaster will prefer to have a couple of dumbheads in his class than a single genius, and if you regard it objectively, he is of course right. His task is not to produce extravagant intellects but good Latinists, arithmeticians and sober decent folk. The question of who suffers more acutely at the other's hands - the teacher at the boy's, or vice versa - who is more of a tyrant, more of a tormentor, and who profanes parts of the other's soul, student or teacher, is something you cannot examine without remembering your own youth in anger and shame. yet that's not what concerns us here. We have the consolation that among true geniuses the wounds almost always heal. As their personalities develop, they create their art in spite of school. Once dead, and enveloped by the comfortable nimbus of remoteness, they are paraded by the schoolmasters before other generations of students as showpieces and noble examples. Thus the struggle between rule and spirit repeats itself year after year from school to school. The authorities go to infinite pains to nip the few profound or more valuable intellects in the bud. And time and again the ones who are detested by their teachers are frequently punished, the runaways and those expelled, are the ones who afterwards add to society's treasure. But some - and who knows how many? - waste away quiet obstinacy and finally go under.”

SchoolEducationStudentsGeniusTeachersHermann HesseInstitutionBeneath The Wheel
Book:Beneath the Wheel
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“It is wrong to say that schoolmasters lack heart and are dried-up, soulless pedants! No, by no means. When a child's talent which he has sought to kindle suddenly bursts forth, when the boy puts aside his wooden sword, slingshot, bow-and-arrow and other childish games, when he begins to forge ahead, when the seriousness of the work begins to transform the rough-neck into a delicate, serious and an almost ascetic creature, when his face takes on an intelligent, deeper and more purposeful expression - then a teacher's heart laughs with happiness and pride. It is his duty and responsibility to control the raw energies and desires of his charges and replace them with calmer, more moderate ideals. What would many happy citizens and trustworthy officials have become but unruly, stormy innovators and dreamers of useless dreams, if not for the effort of their schools? In young beings there is something wild, ungovernable, uncultured which first has to be tamed. It is like a dangerous flame that has to be controlled or it will destroy. Natural man is unpredictable, opaque, dangerous, like a torrent cascading out of uncharted mountains. At the start, his soul is a jungle without paths or order. And, like a jungle, it must first be cleared and its growth thwarted. Thus it is the school's task to subdue and control man with force and make him a useful member of society, to kindle those qualities in him whose development will bring him to triumphant completion.”

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Book:Beneath the Wheel
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“When a tree is polled, it will sprout new shoots nearer its roots. A soul that is ruined in the bud will frequently return to the springtime of its beginnings and its promise-filled childhood, as though it could discover new hopes there and retie the broken threads of life. The shoots grow rapidly and eagerly, but it is only a sham life that will never be a genuine tree.”

SoulYouthRootsMaturityHermann HesseBeneath The Wheel
Book:Beneath the Wheel
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“We who bore the mark might well be considered by the rest of the world as strange, even as insane and dangerous. We had awoken, or were awakening, and we were striving for an ever perfect state of wakefulness, whereas the ambition and quest for happiness of the others consisted of linking their opinions, ideals, and duties, their life and happiness, ever more closely with those of the herd. They, too, strove; they, too showed signs of strength and greatness. But as we saw it, whereas we marked men represented Nature's determination to create something new, individual, and forward-looking, the others lived in the determination to stay the same. For them mankind--which they loved as much as we did--was a fully formed entity that had to be preserved and protected. For us mankind was a distant future toward which we were all journeying, whose aspect no one knew, whose laws weren't written down anywhere.”

HumanityDemianHermann Hesse
Book:Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend
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“What we think of as acts of cruelty are in reality nothing of the kind. Someone from the Middle Ages would still find the whole style of our present-day life abhorrent, but cruel, horrifying and barbaric in a quite different way. Every age, every culture, every ethos and tradition has a style of its own, has the varieties of gentleness and harshness, of beauty and cruelty that are appropriate to it. Each age will take certain kinds of suffering for granted, will patiently accept certain wrongs. Human life becomes a real hell of suffering only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. Required to live in the Middle Ages, someone from the Graeco-Roman period would have died a wretched death by suffocation, just as a savage inevitably would in the midst our civilisation. Now, there are times when a whole generation gets caught to such an extent between two eras, two styles of life, that nothing comes naturally to it since it has lost all sense of morality, security and innocence. A man of Nietzsche's mettle had to endure our present misery more than a generation in advance. Today, thousands are enduring what he had to suffer alone and without being understood.”

SufferingLiteratureExistentialismNietzscheSteppenwolfHermann Hesse
Book:Steppenwolf
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“For it cannot be denied that all over the world and in all ages there are beings who are perceived to be extraordinary, charming, and appealing, and whom many honor as benevolent spirits, because they make one think of a more beautiful, a freer, a more winged life than the one we lead.”

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Book:Pictor's Metamorphoses and Other Fantasies
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“Tanışıklığımızın bu akşamında, bütün bir yaşamı bu güzel ve içtenlikli gözlerin bakışı altında gecirmenin insana mutluluk bağışlayan güzel bir şey sayılacağını, o zaman insanın kötü bir eyleme kalkışamayacağını, kötü bir şey düşünemeyeceğini içimden geçirdim. Ve yine o akşamdan sonra birlik ve bütünlüğe, alabildiğine ince bir ahenge yönelik özlemimi dindirebileceğim bir yerin bulunduğunu, bakışlarına ve sesine varlığımdaki her nabız vuruşunun, her nefesin tüm saflık ve içtenliğiyle yanıt vereceği birinin yeryüzünde yaşadığını biliyordum artık.”

GertrudeRuveydaHermann Hesse
Book:Gertrude
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“Toltosi il berretto, la salutò profondamente come una principessa e se n'andò col cuore oppresso; doveva lasciarla perire. Rimase a lungo turbato, non aveva voglia di parlare con nessuno. Per quanto poco si assomigliassero, quella fiera e povera israelita gli ricordava in certo modo Lidia, la figlia del cavaliere. Amare donne come quelle era fonte di dolore. Ma per qualche tempo gli parve di non aver mai amato altre che queste due, la povera, inquieta Lidia e l'ombrosa, amara israelita.”

LoveLove HurtsHermann HesseNarcissus And GoldmundLove Sad
Book:Narcissus and Goldmund
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“[…] he still closes his eyes to the truth, refusing to acknowledge that clinging desperately to the notion of self, desperately wanting not to die, is the surest route to eternal death. On the other hand, the ability to die, to slough off one’s skin like a snake, to commit oneself to incessant self-transformation is what leads the way to immortality.”

LifePhilosophyMotivationalDeathPhilosophy Of LifeImmortalitySelf TransformationSteppenwolfHermann Hesse
Book:Steppenwolf
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“The thing he most compulsively desired, most stubbornly searched and strove for, was granted to him, but more abundantly than is good for a human being. Initially all he dreamed of and wished for, it later became his bitter lot. Those who live for power are destroyed by power, those who live for money by money; service is the ruin of the servile, pleasure the ruin of the pleasure-seeker. Thus it was Steppenwolf's independence that proved his downfall.”

PhilosophyMoneyPhilosophy Of LifeSteppenwolfHermann HesseLife Meaning
Book:Steppenwolf
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“Can’t you get into your head, my learned friend, that you’ve taken a liking to me and feel that I matter because I’m a kind of mirror for you, because something in me responds to you and understands you? Actually, all human beings ought to be such mirrors for one another, responding and corresponding to each other in this way, but the thing is that cranks like you are oddities. You easily get lead astray, bewitched into thinking that you can no longer see or read anything in the eyes of other people, that there is nothing there that concerns you any more. And when a crank of your sort suddenly discovers a face again that really looks at him, in which he senses something akin to a response and an affinity, it naturally fills him with joy.”

LiteraturePsychologyExistentialismSteppenwolfHermann HesseHesse
Book:Steppenwolf
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“Yaşam konusunda bir fikrin vardı; içinde bir inanç, bir beklenti yaşıyordu; eylemlere, acılara ve özverilere hazırdın. Ama yavaş yavaş anladın ki, dünya hiç de senden eylemlerde ve özverilerde bulunmanı istemiyor; yaşam, kahraman rollerine ve benzeri şeylere yer veren bir kahramanlık destanı değil, insanların yiyip içmeler, kahve yudumlamalar, örgü örmeler, iskambil oynamalar ve radyo dinlemelerle yetinip hallerine şükrettikleri rahat bir orta sınıf evidir.”

SteppenwolfHermann HesseBozkırkurdu
Book:Steppenwolf
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“Novelists when they write novels tend to take an almost godlike attitude toward their subject, pretending to a total comprehension of the story, a man's life, which they can therefore recount as God Himself might, nothing standing between them and the naked truth, the entire story meaningful in every detail. I am as little able to do this as the novelist is, even though my story is more important to me than any novelist's is to him - for this is my story; it is the story of a man, not of an invented, or possible, or idealized, or otherwise absent figure, but of a unique being of flesh and blood, Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and men - each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature - are therefore shot wholesale nowadays. If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose. But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.”

ReligionHuman BeingsNovelStoryDemianHermann Hesse
Book:Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend
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“Pero te voy a decir una cosa: éste es uno de los puntos en los que aparecen con toda claridad los fallos de nuestra religión. El Dios del Antiguo y Nuevo Testamento es, en efecto, una figura extraordinaria; pero no es lo que debe representar. Él es lo bueno, lo noble, lo paternal, lo hermoso, y, también, lo elevado y lo sentimental. ¡De acuerdo! Sin embargo, el mundo se compone de otras cosas; y éstas se adjudican simplemente al diablo, escamoteando y silenciando toda una mitad del mundo. Se venera a Dios como padre de la vida, negando al mismo tiempo la vida sexual, sobre la que se basa la vida misma, declarándola diabólica y pecaminosa. No tengo nada en contra de que se venere al Dios Jehová. ¡En absoluto! Pero opino que deberíamos santificar y venerar al mundo en su totalidad, no sólo a esa mitad oficial, separada artificialmente. Por lo tanto, deberíamos tener un culto al demonio junto al culto divino. Sería lo justo. O si no, habría que crear un dios que integrara en sí al diablo y ante el que no tuviéramos que cerrar los ojos cuando suceden las cosas más naturales de la vida.”

DiosReligiónDemianHermann Hesse
Book:Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend
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“During the dark hours I felt my sick heart expand and beat more furiously, and I no longer made any distinction between pleasure and pain, but one was similar to the other; both hurt and both were precious. Whether my inner life went well or badly, my discovered strength stood peacefully outside looking on and knew that light and dark were closely related and that sorrow and peace were rhythm, part and spirit of the same great music.”

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Author:Hermann Hesse
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“My lie has been miserable and difficult, and yet to others and sometimes to myself, it has seemed rich and wonderful. Man's life seems to me like a long, weary night that would be intolerable if there were not occasionally flashes of light, the sudden brightness of which is so comforting and wonderful, that the moments of their appearance cancel out and justify the years of darkness.”

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Book:Gertrude
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“Kada mislim na Firencu, kao prvu sliku ne vidim katedralu ili palatu Sinjorije, već jezerce sa zlatnim karašima u Gardino Boboliju, gde sam prvog mog popodneva u Firenci razgovarao sa nekim ženama i njihovom decom, prvi put čuo florentinski jezik i grad koji mi je bio poznat iz mnogih knjiga po prvi put osetio kao nešto stvarno i živo sa čim mogu da pričam i što sam mogao da uhvatim rukama. Katedrala i stara palata i sve što je u Firenci poznato, nije mi zbog toga izmaklo; mislim da sam je bolje doživeo i srdačnije učinio svojom nego mnogi vredni turisti sa rurističkim vodičem u rukama. Sve mi se sigurno i jedinstveno pojavljuje iz veoma malih, sporednih događaja, i ako sam zaboravio nekoliko lepih slika iz Uficija, imam zato sećanja na večeri koje sam proveo ćaskajući sa domaćicom u kuhinji, sa momcima i ljudima u malim vinskim krčmama, sećanja na pričljivog krojača iz predgrađa koji je na svojim kućnim vratima na meni krpio pocepane pantalone, i uz to me počastio vatrenim političkim govorom, operskim melodijama i veselim narodnim pesmicama.”

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Author:Hermann Hesse
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“Acostumbramos a trazar límites demasiado estrechos a nuestra personalidad. Consideramos que solamente pertenece a nuestra persona lo que reconocemos como individual y diferenciador. Pero cada uno está constituido por la totalidad del mundo; y así como llevamos en nuestro cuerpo la trayectoria de la evolución..., así llevamos en el alma todo lo que desde un principio ha vivido en las almas humanas...-¿dónde queda entonces el valor del individuo?-objeté yo-...(Pistorius)...En cada uno existen las posibilidades de ser; pero sólo cuando las vislumbra, cuando aprende a hacerlas conscientes, por lo menos en parte, estas posibilidades le pertenecen.”

DemianHermann HesseHerencia
Book:Demian / Siddhartha
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