Hermann Hesse citations

Page 3

Propos rapportés

, 1927)

Le Voyage en Orient (', 1932)

, 1943)

, 1943)

Le Jeu des perles de verre (Das Glasperlenspiel, 1943)

Source: Demian (1919), p. 149
Contexte: Now everything changed. My childhood world was breaking apart around me. My parents eyed me with a certain embarrassment. My sisters had become strangers to me. A disenchantment falsified and blunted my usual feelings and joys: the garden lacked fragrance, the woods held no attraction for me, the world stood around me like a clearance sale of last year's secondhand goods, insipid, all its charm gone. Books were so much paper, music a grating noise. That is the way leaves fall around a tree in autumn, a tree unaware of the rain running down its sides, of the sun or the frost, and of life gradually retreating inward. The tree does not die. It waits.

Journey to the East (1932)
Contexte: It was my destiny to join in a great experience. Having had the good fortune to belong to the League, I was permitted to be a participant in unique journey. What wonder it had at the time! How radiant and comet-like it seemed, and how quickly it has been forgotten and allowed to fall into disrepute. For this reason, I have decided to attempt a short description of this fabulous journey, a journey the like of which had not been attempted since the days of Hugo and mad Roland.

Steppenwolf (1927)
Contexte: He gained strength through familiarity with the thought that the emergency exit stood always open and became curious, too, to taste his suffering to the dregs. If it went too badly with him he could feel sometimes with a grim malicious pleasure: “I am curious to see all the same just how much man can endure. If the limit of what is bearable is reached, I have only to open the door to escape.” There are a great many suicides to which this thought imparts a common strength.

Source: Demian (1919), p. 166
Variant translation: The bird is struggling out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born must first destroy a world. The bird is flying to God. The name of the God is called Abraxas.
As translated by W. J. Strachan
Contexte: The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. The God's name is Abraxas.

Source: Demian (1919), p. 180
Contexte: Our god's name is Abraxas and he is God and Satan and he contains both the luminous and the dark world. Abraxas does not take exception to any of your thoughts, any of your dreams. Never forget that. But he will leave you once you've become blameless and normal. Then he will leave you and look for a different vessel in which to brew his thoughts.

Source: Gertrude (1910), p. 165

Source: Demian (1919), p. 181
Contexte: You, too, have mysteries of your own. I know that you must have dreams that you don't tell me. I don't want to know them. But I can tell you: live those dreams, play with them, build altars to them. It is not yet the ideal but it points in the right direction. Whether you and I and a few others will renew the world someday remains to be seen. But within ourselves we must renew it each day, otherwise we just aren't serious. Don't forget that!

Siddhartha (1922)
Contexte: Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Samsara and Nirvana, illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real.

Steppenwolf (1927)

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p.149

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Siddhartha (1922)

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p. 154

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p. 59

Source: Siddhartha (1922), p. 94

Steppenwolf (1927)

Source: Demian (1919), p. 94

Steppenwolf (1927)

Source: Siddhartha (1922), p. 94

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p. 22

Demian (1919)
Variante: I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?

H. Rosner, trans. (Bantam: 1971), p. 5
Siddhartha (1922)

Source: Demian (1919), p. 168

Narcissus and Goldmund (1930)

Source: Demian (1919), p. 135