‘One never reaches home,’ she said. ‘But where paths that have an affinity for each other intersect, the whole world looks like home, for a time.’
Hermann Hesse, Demian (Thank you, liquidnight)
I admit that my own life frequently appears exactly like a legend. I often see and feel the outer world connected and in harmony with my inner world in a way I can only call magical.
Hermann Hesse. Thank you, Whiskey River.
Hermann Hesse in his garden (date unknown) From predatorywaspobserver.
Hermann Hesse “Hauser am Waltrand,” 1929, Heiner Hesse Arcegno.
“The entire simple cycle of life that so much preoccupies men and which all religions interpret with veneration, takes place unambiguously, rapidly, and in silence in the garden.”
—Hermann Hesse, “In The Garden,” 1908.
Courtesy of The Blue Lantern
To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do.
Hermann Hesse (via melancholynotes)
(Source: growing-orbits)
Hermann Hesse: “Sonnenblumen in Montagnola,” um 1927, water colour and pencil on paper (from Memory Green more paintings by Hesse here.)
There is no escape. You can’t be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don’t try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror man is- particularly the artist- particularly myself!
Hermann Hesse (via thechocolatebrigade) (via peachfuss) (via checosasonolenuvole) (via petersantiago)
Each man has only one genuine vocation: to find the way to himself.
Hermann Hesse (via suchness)
We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.
Hermann Hesse
