Lola > Lola's Quotes

“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.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged — to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony.”
― Hermann Hesse, Gertrude

“Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.”
― Hermann Hesse

“If I know what love is, it is because of you.”
― Hermann Hesse

“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.”
― Hermann Hesse

“Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.”
― Hermann Hesse, Wer lieben kann, ist glücklich. Über die Liebe

“Often it is the most deserving people who cannot help loving those who destroy them.”
― Herman Hesse

“When someone seeks," said Siddhartha, "then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.”
― Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

“Love must not entreat,' she added, 'or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“When you like someone, you like them in spite of their faults. When you love someone, you love them with their faults.”
― Hermann Hesse, Wer lieben kann, ist glücklich. Über die Liebe

“I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference.”
― Herman Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“In eternity there is no time, only an instant long enough for a joke.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is.”
― Hermann Hesse

“You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.”
― Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

“When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols...”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“For 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.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian

“You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them!”
― Hermann Hesse

“Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself....His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness.”
― Herman Hesse

“I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“I learned through my body and soul that it was necessary to sin, that I needed lust, that I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of desired imaginary vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, to love it and be glad to belong to it.”
― Hermann Hesse

“You've never lived what you are thinking, and that isn't good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“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.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“I have always been a great dreamer. In dreams I have always been more active than in my real life, and these shadows sapped me of my health and energy.”
― Herman Hesse

“Hope
Smiles from the threshold of the year to come,
Whispering 'it will be happier'...”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

“Isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?”
― L.M. Montgomery

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
― Rudyard Kipling

“Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes