Author of quotes: Hermann Hesse. Page 2

A gust of wind preceding a thunderstorm that is about to burst, driving us into the house and also trying to snatch the door handle from our hands, or an acute toothache when it seems that all the troubles, suffering and conflicts of the world are concentrated in your jaw, these are things in the reality and meaning of which we may perhaps someday doubt, but at the moment when we feel them, these things do not allow any doubt and are extremely real.

Even if you did not walk, but were led, even if there was no unauthorized overstepping of limits, but only a rotation of space around the one standing in its center, the virtues still continued to exist and retained their value.

His path went in a circle, or in an ellipse, or in a spiral, whatever you like, but not in a straight line, for straightness was characteristic only of geometry, and not of nature and life.

Times of terror and great calamity may come. But if there is happiness in adversity, then it can only be spiritual - looking back to save the culture of the past, looking forward to represent the spirit with cheerful cheerfulness in an era that would otherwise be entirely in the power of matter.

We need teachers more than all others, people who, instilling in young people the ability to find the right criteria, serve as an example of reverence for the truth, obedience to the spirit, and service to the word.

If, in the struggle of interests and slogans, truth is in danger of being as devalued, mutilated and raped as an individual person, as a language, as an art, as everything organic or skillfully cultivated, then our only duty is to resist and save the truth, that is, our desire to truth as our highest dogma.

So we float through our day and through our time, each in his own way, each trying to drive away suffering from himself, both others and his own, and yet each is surrounded by this suffering and secretly subject to it, and is on the way to such a state when suffering no longer causes pain, and happiness no longer seems desirable.

He is now big and mature. They are all like that. They are all somewhat insincere and deceitful, they play some role, they pretend to be different from what they are.

Those deeds of our life that we call good and which it is easy for us to talk about, almost entirely belong to this first, “easy” kind, and we easily forget about them. Other things that are hard for us to talk about, we can never forget, they are to some extent more ours than those, and their long shadows fall on all the days of our lives.

But there is only one law and one and only way to be educated and grow spiritually on books - to respect what you read, to be patient in the impulse to understand, careful in judgments and be able to listen. And he who reads only in order to kill time, no matter how much and what, even the best, he reads, he will still forget everything, remaining as poor as before. But to the one who reads books as well as listens to his friends, they will open and belong. What such a person reads will not slip through his fingers and will not be lost, but will remain in him, become his property, to please and console him in the way that only friends can.

And the most unhappy life has its bright hours and its flowers of happiness among sand and stones.

Meditation is such a gratifying thing that it comforts and helps to live.

There is not a single thing in the world that would not be as beautiful, as desirable, could make you as happy as its opposite!

In order for there to be a decline and a rise, it is necessary that there be a bottom and a top. But there is no bottom and top, it lives only in the human brain, in the homeland of illusions.