Hermann Hesse citáty

page 6

„Niektorí z nás si myslia, že keď vydržia, tak sa stanú silnejšími, ale niekedy je lepšie odísť.“

„Múdrosť nie je nič iné ako príprava duše, schopnosť, tajné umenie myslieť, cítiť a dýchať myšlienky jednoty v každom okamihu života.“

„Umenie života spočíva v tom, že sa učíme trpieť a usmievať sa.“

„Zlo sa vždy rodí tam, kde chýba láska.“

„Láska nechce nič mať, chce len milovať.“

„Pokoj je najvyššia vedomosť a láska, je to uistenie, že si uvedomujem celú realitu na kraji všetkých hĺbok a priepastí. Pokoj je tajomstvo krásy a podstatná súčasť umenia.“

„Láska je šťastie. Kto vie milovať, je šťastný.“

„Čím viac milujeme a darujeme sa, tým sa náš život stáva významnejším a hodnotnejším.“

„Život dostáva zmysel jedine láskou. Čím viac sme schopní milovať a dávať sa, tým väčší zmysel má náš život.“

„Láska je túžba, ktorá zmúdrela.“

„Vedomosť môžme odovzdať, múdrosť nie …“

„Šťastný je jedine ten, kto od zajtrajška nič nečaká a s vďakou prijíma to, čo mu prináša každý nový deň.“

„Každý zo skúsenosti vie, aké ľahké je zaľúbiť sa, ale aj aké ťažké je skutočne mať rád.“

„Cieľ, ktorý bol dosiahnutý, už nie je cieľom.“

„Osamelosť je cesta, ktorá človeka privádza k nemu samému.“

„Život každého človeka je cestou k sebe samému.“

„Milovať a poznať je takmer to isté, lebo človeka, ktorého máme radšej aj lepšie poznáme.“

„Väčšina ľudí stroskotá na tom, že si je sama sebou príliš istá.“

„Zákon lásky je viac ako prikázaním, je výzvou ku šťastiu.“

„Veselosť nie je ani žartovanie ani márnomyseľnosť. Je to najväčší poznatok lásky.“

„Žiaden človek nevycíti v inom človeku záchvev, ak ho nemá sám v sebe.“

„Celé ľudské dejiny nie sú ničím iným, ako obrázkovou knihou, v ktorej je zaznamenaná najprudšia a najslepejšia ľudská túžba: túžba zabudnúť.“

„Hĺbky a tajomstvá sveta nie sú tam, kde sú oblaky a čierňavy, hĺbka spočíva v jasnosti a jednoduchosti.“

„Lepšie je ísť s rozumným človekom do pekla, ako s hlupákom do neba.“

„Naozaj žiadny nie je múdry, kto nepozná tmu.“

„Odvaha potrebuje rozum, ale nesmie ho slepo poslúchať.“

„Usiluj sa uskutočňovať poznané pravdy – nie ako požiadavku na iných, ale ako požiadavku na seba.“

„Ak niekoho nenávidíte, nenávidíte v ňom niečo, čo je súčasťou vás. To, čo nie je našou súčasťou, nám nevadí.“

“For a long time one school of players favored the technique of stating side by side, developing in counterpoint, and finally harmoniously combining two hostile themes or ideas, such as law and freedom, individual and community. In such a Game the goal was to develop both themes or theses with complete equality and impartiality, to evolve out of thesis and antithesis the purest possible synthesis. In general, aside from certain brilliant exceptions, Games with discordant, negative, or skeptical conclusions were unpopular and at times actually forbidden. This followed directly from the meaning the Game had acquired at its height for the players. It represented an elite, symbolic form of seeking for perfection, a sublime alchemy, an approach to that Mind which beyond all images and multiplicities is one within itself — in other words, to God. Pious thinkers of earlier times had represented the life of creatures, say, as a mode of motion toward God, and had considered that the variety of the phenomenal world reached perfection and ultimate cognition only in the divine Unity. Similarly, the symbols and formulas of the Glass Bead Game combined structurally, musically, and philosophically within the framework of a universal language, were nourished by all the sciences and arts, and strove in play to achieve perfection, pure being, the fullness of reality. ”

“How alien our country has become from her noblest Province and how unfaithful to that Province's spirit; how far body and soul, ideal and reality have moved apart in our country; how little they know about each other, or want to know.”

“If nature has made you a bat, you shouldn't try and be an ostrich. You consider yourself odd at times, you accuse yourself of taking a road different from most people. You have to unlearn that! Gaze into the fire, the clouds and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak - surrender to them. Don't ask first whether it is permitted or would please your teachers or your father or some God. You will ruin yourself if you do that. That way you will become earth bound, a vegetable.”

“It was as if by becoming a musician and Music Master he had chosen music as one of the ways toward man's highest goal, inner freedom, purity, perfection, and as though ever since making that choice he has done nothing but let himself be more and more permeated, transformed, purified by music — his entire self from his nimble, clever pianist's hands and his vast, well-stocked musician's memory to all the parts and organs of body and soul, to his pulses and breathing, to his sleep and dreaming — so that he was now only a symbol, or rather a manifestation, a personification of music.”

“The world, as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish — and it will.”

“I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.”

“How foolish to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.”

“To find new light that old ties cannot give.”

“The "music of decline" had sounded, as in that wonderful Chinese fable; like a thrumming bass on the organ its reverberations faded slowly out over decades; its throbbing could be heard in the corruption of the schools, periodicals, and universities, in melancholia and insanity among those artists and critics who could still be taken seriously; it raged as untrammeled and amateurish overproduction in all the arts.”

“You are like me; you are different from other people. You are Kamala and no one else, and within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself, just as I can. Few people have that capacity and yet everyone could have it.”

“We were picking apart a problem in linguistic history and, as it were, examining close up the peak period of glory in the history of a language; in minutes we had traced the path which had taken it several centuries. And I was powerfully gripped by the vision of transitoriness: the way before our eyes such a complex, ancient, venerable organism, slowly built up over many generations, reaches its highest point, which already contains the germ of decay, and the whole intelligently articulated structure begins to droop, to degenerate, to totter toward its doom. And at the same time the thought abruptly shot through me, with a joyful, startled amazement, that despite the decay and death of that language it had not been lost, that its youth, maturity, and downfall were preserved in our memory, in our knowledge of it and its history, and would survive and could at any time be reconstructed in the symbols and formulas of scholarship as well as in the recondite formulations of the Glass Bead Game. I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that 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. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.”

“As for others and the world around him he never ceased in his heroic and earnest endeavor to love them, to be just to them, to do them no harm, for the love of his neighbor was as deeply in him as the hatred of himself, and so his whole life was an example that love of one's neighbor is not possible without love of one's self, and that self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.”

“Instead of playing his part as truly and honestly as he could, the German intellectual has constantly rebelled against the word and against reason and courted wonderful creations of sound, and wonderful beauties of feeling and mood that were never pressed home to reality, has left the greater part of its practical gifts to decay. None of us intellectuals is at home in reality. We are strange to it and hostile. That is why the part played by intellect even in our own German reality, in our history and politics and public opinion, has be so lamentable a one.”

“But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces.”

“And let no sentiments of home detain us.”

“Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.”

“The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life's wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.”