"It was shameless how life made fun of one; it was a joke, a cause for weeping! Either one lived and let one's senses play, drank full at the primitive...

I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am responsible for what I do with the life I've got.
~ Hermann Hesse ~












I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am...
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More Hermann Hesse quotes
"The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life ...
"For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even mo...
"You've never lived what you are thinking, and that isn't good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.
"There had been a quarrel, she had been hurt, had wept. Now it was over; now she sat still and waited. Life would go on. As with children. As with anim...
"He had thrown himself away, he had lost interest in everything, and life, falling in with his feelings, had demanded nothing of him. He had lived as a...
"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 u...
"One knew nothing. One lived and walked about on the earth or rode through the forests, and so many things looked at one with such challenge and promis...
"I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to matu...
"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 w...
"Siddhartha has one single goal-to become empty, to become empty of thirst, desire, dreams, pleasure and sorrow-to let the Self die. No longer to be Se...
"Would you actually believe that you had committed your foolish acts in order to spare your son from committing them too? And could you in any way prot...
"When someone is seeking,” said Siddartha, “It happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything,...
"Not in his speech, not in his thoughts, I see his greatness, only in his actions, in his life.
"They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming...