Author » Hesse, Hermann
21 posts
Knowledge can be communicated, but wisdom cannot. A man can find it, he can live it, he can be filled and sustained by it, but he cannot utter or teach it.
If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.
I have known it for a long time but I have only just experienced it. Now I know it not only with my intellect, but with my eyes, with my heart, with my stomach.
You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.
One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.
The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.
What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men -- each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature -- are shot down wholesale.
In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified.
There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge -- that is everywhere.
What I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.