If the War Goes on Quotes

“Light the Christmas candles for your children! Let them sing carols! But don't delude yourselves, don't content yourselves year after year with the shabby, pathetic, sentimental feeling you have when you celebrate your holidays! Demand more of yourselves! Love and joy and the mysterious thing we call "happiness" are not over here or over there, they are only "within yourselves.”
― Hermann Hesse, If the War Goes on: Reflections on War and Politics

“In respect to mankind we all of us have but one task. To help mankind as a whole make some small advance, to better a particular institution, to do away with one particular mode of killing - all these are commendable, but they are not my task and yours. Our task as men is this: in our own unique personal lives, to take a short step on the road from animal to man.”
― Hermann Hesse, If the War Goes on: Reflections on War and Politics

“Man, we feel in the presence of such mighty maxims, is not an animal; he is not a determinate, finite entity, not a being completed once and for all, but a coming-into-being, a project, a dream of the future, a yearning of nature for new forms and possibilities.”
― Hermann Hesse, If the War Goes on: Reflections on War and Politics

“Gustavo Solivellas dice: "Cuando buscamos a alguien, buscamos en nuestro entorno algo que está dentro de todos" (Hermann Hesse)”
― Hermann Hesse, If the War Goes on: Reflections on War and Politics

“Beethoven's music and the words of the Bible told me exactly the same thing; they were water from the same spring, the only spring from which man derives good. And then suddenly, Herr Minister, it came to me that your speech and the speeches of your governing colleagues in both camps do not flow from that spring, that they lack what can make human words important and valuable. They lack love, they lack humanity.”
― Hermann Hesse, If the War Goes on: Reflections on War and Politics

“We kill so much! Not only in our stupid battles, the stupid street fighting of our revolution, our stupid executions - no, we kill at every step. We kill when circumstances force us to drive gifted young people into occupations for which they are not suited. We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, affliction, or infamy.”
― Hermann Hesse, If the War Goes on: Reflections on War and Politics

“Be that as it may, one opinion that has often been expressed in the course of the war is absolutely mistaken: the opinion that, through its sheer magnitude and the gigantic mechanism of horror it set in motion, this war would frighten future generations out of ever making war again. Fear teaches men nothing. If men enjoy killing, no memory of war will deter them. Nor will the knowledge of the material damage wrought by war. Only in infinitesimal degree do men's actions spring from rational considerations. One can be thoroughly convinced that an action is absurd and still delight in it. Every passionate man does just that.”
― Hermann Hesse, If the War Goes on: Reflections on War and Politics

“Though to this day no panegyrist of life has succeeded in escaping death, the conviction that life is worth living is the ultimate content and consolation of all art.”
― Hermann Hesse, If the War Goes on: Reflections on War and Politics

“When I call my articles "political", it is always in quotes, for there is nothing political about them but the atmosphere in which they came into being. In all other respects they are the opposite of political, because in each one of these essays I strive to guide the reader not into the world theater with its political problems but into his innermost being, before the judgment seat of his very personal conscience. In this I am at odds with the political thinkers of all trends, and I shall always, incorrigibly, recognize in man, in the individual man and his soul, the existence of realms to which political impulses and forms do not extend.”
― Hermann Hesse, If the War Goes on: Reflections on War and Politics

“The truth is simply that money, power, and all the possessions for which men torment and ultimately shoot each other mean little to one who has come to himself, to a self-willed man. He values only one thing, the mysterious power in himself which bids him live and helps him to grow. This power can be neither preserved nor increased nor deepened by money and power, because money and power are the inventions of distrust. Those who distrust the life-giving force within them, or who have none, are driven to compensate through such substitutes as money. When a man has confidence in himself, when all he wants in the world is to live out his destiny in freedom and purity, he comes to regard all those vastly overestimated and far too costly possessions as mere accessories, pleasant perhaps to have and make use of, but never essential.”
― Hermann Hesse, If the War Goes on: Reflections on War and Politics