Hesse Quotes

“And now that they had met and begun to see more of one another, she seemed to have fallen in love with him. A new problem with women loomed on the horizon for Hesse. That was the worst thing he could imagine: he found the prospect of entering into binding relationships with other people hard to take. This too was down to the heretic and the mystic in him, who shunned anything that threatened to formalize and institutionalize a living feeling - be that the established Church or the institution of marriage. This extreme self-centeredness was narcissistic. But in this, Hesse was far from being an exception among artists.”
― Gunnar Decker, Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow

“What a person reads, or how much he or she reads, is only of secondary importance. The only really important things was that one should always begin reading with a genuine sense of expectation, with complete immersion in the magic of the moment.”
― Gunnar Decker, Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow

“Hesse, the passionate reader who could not live without books, nevertheless harbored just as large a degree of skepticism toward the written word. For everything that was written ran the risk of having no life thereafter, of being nothing but an assemblage of dead letters. It was this Franciscan sympathy for poverty, including poverty of the spirit, that led him to see books differently than the educated bourgeois elite did. Books were alive like trees or clouds in the sky, they were our companions on that journey that ended inevitably in our death. But the key question was, Do we perish in our entirety, or does something of us live on - perhaps in the written word? For Hesse, true education, of which proper reading formed an integral part, must lead to inner growth. But proper reading is the same as proper living: one can only learn this art if one does not imagine one knows what it consists of in advance. One must always be open to new discovery, like a wayfarer who cannot see his goal but instead carries it within himself.”
― Gunnar Decker, Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow

“Regarding books - specifically their life-enhancing capacity and their ability to build bridges between yesterday, today, and tomorrow, the inner and outer life, the real and the ideal, and the body and the mind - Hesse became an evangelist of a secular spirit, which nevertheless still had a transcendental spark in it, and which in his own finite existence touched upon a little piece of immortality, He was not concerned with reality but with the mystery of life, which consisted at one and the same time of nature and spirit. This inherent contradiction culminated, at best, in the growth of civilization, at worst in barbarism. It was necessary to look the danger of the self-destruction of the individual and of the while squarely in the face; such a danger was part and parcel of the claim to truth. That was why this could not be achieved simply through avid reading - the decisive factor was always real life.”
― Gunnar Decker, Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow

“Claims that the inhospitable Herman Hesse possessed a 'genius for friendship' relate first and foremost to his books, not to relationships with real people. Little wonder that he could become extremely irritable when anything unforeseen disturbed his quiet dialogue with books: namely, a third party who was just as passionate a reader as he was - Ninon! Hesse was beside himself with rage: anyone who dared to make free with his books without permission would feel the full weight of his righteous anger. But the fact that Ninon removed books from his shelves that the would later look for in vain would often have a quite plausible reason that should actually have made him more conciliatory toward her: she was planning to read them aloud to him because of his bad eyes. She had also increasingly taken to reading books that Hesse had been sent to review, digesting the contents and giving him a summary of what she thought of them. In 1929 she started to keep a record of all the books she had read to Hesse on long evenings spent together: they totalled some 1,500! One is reminded of Nietzsche, who, thanks to an eye condition similar to Hesse's, expressed a wish to have 'a reading machine' - in the shape of his companion Lou Andreas-Salomé, whom he was even prepared to marry if need be.”
― Gunnar Decker, Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow

“Does that mean that all one has to do is wait for the right moment? It was not just a question of that, as Hesse explained: the vita active and the vita contemplativa stand in a very sensitive relation to one another, which must constantly be rebalanced. He would come to summarize this in 1956: 'The flaw in our questioning and complaining is presumably this: namely, that we desire to have something given to us from outside that we can only attain within ourselves, through our own dedication. We demand that life must have a meaning - yet it has precisely as much meaning as we are able to impart to it.' This led him on to formulate the idea of a elite, a secret society, the invisible realm of the league of those taking part in The Journey to the East and finally to The Glass Bead Game - the 'monastery for free spirits' that Nietzsche had in mind and that Hesse affirmed and rejected in equal measure: 'In short, wanting to improve humanity is always a hopeless task. That is why I have always built my faith on the individual, for the individual can be educated and is capable of improvement, and according to my faith it has always been and still remains the small elite of well-intentioned, dedicated, and courageous people who are the guardians of all that is good and beautiful in the world.”
― Gunnar Decker, Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow

“Every doctrine contains its own inherent contradiction, with which it struggles. For this reason, doctrine is never the way to wisdom. Only when one recognizes that a thing constitutes a whole only when combined with its opposite is one on the path to wisdom. Nor can one ascend to a state of wisdom by one's own efforts. Rather, one is raised up to it (or abased, which amounts to the same thing), and if one becomes party to wisdom, one cannot count that as a personal success. Instead, it is a gift that one must prove oneself worthy of.”
― Gunnar Decker, Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow

“He consigned Nietzsche to the things he needed to leave behind: 'I am convinced, though, that it is precisely the readers and writers on Nietzsche who have no future; for when all is said and done, Nietzsche too is of the old school. Secretly he had more homesickness for the land of the Greeks than for the country of Zarathustra's childhood ... If I voyage on the ship of modernity, then I am one of those who look past the busy industriousness and the revelries of my fellow passengers and gaze back at the sinking, temple-shrewn shores of the land we have left behind.' But the way in which he concludes this passage does not sound at all melancholic, revealing instead an impetuous urge to plow his own furrow: 'Indeed, what is Nietzsche to us? Or philosophy in general? An exercise, mental gymnastics, something pleasant and useful! But what's the point of that?”
― Gunnar Decker, Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow

“There is a whole swathe of nervous German professors who fear something like a Buddhist inundation and a decline of the intellectual West. Rest assured, the West will not collapse and Europe will never become a Buddhist empire. Anyone who reads the Buddha's speeches and converts to Buddhism as a result may well have thereby found some kind of solace for himself - yet in place of the path that the Buddha might show us, all that person has opted for is an emergency exit.”
― Gunnar Decker, Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow

“One thing alone was certain, and this became the leitmotif of this remarkable myth of the Brahmin's son Siddhartha, who sets off on a journey to try and discover the truth about his life: Place no credence in those who teach wisdom, for you can only attain wisdom through your own life and your own sacrifices. By contrast, if you follow the former path, all you will ever be is at best a good student, who in turn becomes a teacher who has nothing to impart about his own experience - except for knowledge that is of little value.
That insight undoubtedly had more of Nietzsche's Zarathustra about it than Buddha. 'Don't follow me, follow yourself.' For it was not a question of renouncing the Self but precisely about finding it. This was a very Western line of thought. The only things that were to be left behind were the idols that feigned a truth they did not possess. This also included smashing false self-images. Individualism that had disconnected itself from the totality of thing was an aberration. The Enlightenment image of humans as masters of nature was a lie. Siddhartha finds himself faced by a series of pure graven images - all of which he must destroy in order to become himself.”
― Gunnar Decker, Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow