“In my body and in my soul I realized that I greatly needed sin, I needed lust, vanity, the striving for goods, and I needed the most shameful despair to learn how to give up resistance, to learn how to love the world, to stop comparing the world with any world that I wish for, that I imagine, with any perfection that I think up; I learned how to let the world be as it is, and to love it and to belong to it gladly.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 125)
Hermann Hesse Quotes
“The world, my friend, is not imperfect or developing slowly toward perfection. No, the world is perfect at every moment, all sin already contains grace, all youngsters already contain oldsters, all babies contain death, all the dying contain eternal life. It is not possible for any man to see how far along another man is on his way; Buddha is waiting in robbers and dicers, the robber is waiting in the Brahmin. In deep meditation it is possible to eliminate time, to see all past, all present, all developing life as coexisting, and everything is good, everything perfect, everything Brahma.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 125)
“Wisdom cannot be communicated. Wisdom that a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish. Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. We can find it, we can live it, we can be carried by it, we can work wonders with it, but we cannot utter it or teach it.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 124)
“Slowly blossomed, slowly ripened in Siddhartha the insight, the knowledge of what wisdom actually is, what the goal of his long seeking was. It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, an ability, a secret art, to think the thought of oneness, to feel and breathe the oneness at every moment, in the midst of life. Slowly this blossomed in him, brightly emanated to him from Vasudeva’s old childlike face: harmony, knowledge of the eternal perfection of the world, smiling, oneness.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 114)
“What father, what teacher could shield [his son] from living his own life, soiling himself with life, burdening himself with guilt, drinking the better drink himself, finding his path himself? Do you really believe, dear friend, that anyone at all is spared this path? Perhaps your little son because you love him, because you would like to spare him pain and sorrow and disillusion? But even if you died for him ten times over, you could not take away even the tiniest bit of his destiny.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 106)
“[Siddhartha’s son] too is called, he too is of eternal life. But do we know then, you and I, to what he is called, to what path, to what deeds, to what sufferings? His sufferings will not be small, his heart is too hard and proud. Such hearts must suffer much, wander much, do much injustice, saddle themselves with many sins. You never force him, never beat him, never order him, becasue you know that soft is stronger than hard, water stronger than rock, love stronger than violence. Very good, I praise you. But is it not a mistake to your part to believe that you never force him, never punish him? Do you not bind him in bonds with your love? Do you not shame him daily and make things even harder for him with your kindness and patience? Do you not force him, the arrogant and pampered boy, to live in a hut with two old banana eaters, for whom even rice is a delicacy, whose thoughts cannot be his, whose hearts are old and silent and take a different course from his? Is he not forced by all this, not punished?”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 105)
“On many evenings, they sat together at the tree trunk by the bank, silently listening to the water, which was no water for them, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of eternal Becoming.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 95)
“One of the ferryman’s greatest virtues was that he knew how to listen like few other people. Without a word from Vasudeva, the speaker felt that the ferryman took in his words, silent, open, waiting, missing none, impatient for none, neither praising nor blaming, but only listening. Siddhartha felt what happiness it is to unburden himself to such a listener, to sink his own life into this listener’s heart, his own seeking, his own suffering.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 92)
“That was why he had had to go out into the world, losing himself in pleasure and power, in women and money, had had to become a merchant, a dicer, a drinker, a grasper, until the priest and the samana inside him were dead. That was why he had had to keep enduring those ugly years, enduring the disgust, the emptiness, the meaninglessness of a bleak and lost life, to the end, to bitter despair, until Siddhartha the sensualist, Siddhartha the grasper could die. He had died; a new Siddhartha had awoken from sleep. He too would grow old, he too would have to die someday—Siddhartha was ephemeral, every formation was ephemeral. But today he was young, was a child, the new Siddhartha, and was full of joy.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 88)
“He could have remained with Kamaswami for years, acquiring money, squandering money, fattening his belly and letting his soul go thirsty; he could have gone on living for years in that gentle, well-cushioned hell—if this had not come: the moment of utter hopelessness and helplessness, that extreme moment, when he had hung over the rushing water and had been ready to destroy himself. He had felt that despair, that deepest disgust, and he had no succumbed: the bird, the cheerful source and voice in him were still alive; and that was why he felt this joy, why he laughed, why his face beamed under his graying hair.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 86)
“I had to go through so much stupidity, so much vice, so much error, so much disgust and disillusion and distress, merely in order to become a child again and begin afresh. But it was right, my heart says yes, my eyes are laughing. I had to experience despair, I had to sink down to the most foolish of all thoughts, to the thought of suicide, in order to experience grace, to hear om again, to sleep properly again and to awaken properly again. I had to become a fool in order to find Atman in me again. I had to sin in order to live again.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 85)
“That was the enchantment that had happened to him in his sleep and through the om: he now loved everything and everyone, he was full of cheerful love for anything he saw. And it seemed to him now that he had been so ill earlier because he had been able to love nothing and no one.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 83)
“The potter’s wheel, once set in motion, keeps spinning and spinning, and only gradually slackens and comes to a halt; and likewise, in Siddhartha’s soul, the wheel of asceticism, the wheel of thinking, the wheel of discrimination had kept turning and turning, was still turning, but was now sluggish and hesitant and on the verge of halting. Slowly, the way moisture creeps into the dying tree stump, slowly filling it and rotting it, worldliness and slothfulness had crept into Siddhartha’s soul; slowly they filled his soul, made it heavy, made it weary, lulled it to sleep.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 68)
“At times he heard, deep in his breast, a soft and dying voice that admonished softly, lamented softly, barely audible. Then for an hour he was aware that he was leading a strange life, that he was doing all sorts of things that were merely a game, that he was cheerful, granted, and sometimes felt joy, but that real life was flowing past him and not touching him. Like a juggler juggling his balls, he played with his business, with the people around him, watched them, enjoyed them; but he never participated with his heart, with the wellspring of his being. The wellspring ran somewhere, as if far from him, ran and ran, invisible, having nothing to do with his life. And sometimes he was startled by such thoughts and wished that it could be granted him to participate with passion and with all his heart in the childlike doings of the day, to live really—to act really, to enjoy really, and to live really instead of merely standing on the side as a spectator.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 63)
“She thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it. She taught him that after a celebration of love the lovers should not part without admiring each other, without being conquered or having conquered, so that neither is bleak or glutted or has the bad feeling of having misused or been misused. He spent wonderful hours with the clever and beautiful artist, became her pupil, her lover, her friend.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 60)
“If you toss a stone into water, it takes the swiftest way to the bottom. And Siddhartha is like that when he has a goal, makes a resolve. Siddhartha does nothing, he waits, he thinks, he fasts, but he passes through the things of the world like the stone through the water, never acting, never stirring. He is drawn, he lets himself drop. His goal draws him, for he lets nothing into his soul that could go against his goal.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 56)
“For the first time, all this, all this yellow and blue, river and forest, passed into Siddhartha through his eyes, was no longer the magic of Mara, was no longer the veil of Maya, was no longer senseless and random diversity of the world of appearance, despised by the deep thinking Brahmin, who disdains the diversity, who seeks the unity. Blue was blue, river was river, and even though the One and the Divine lived concealed in the blue and the river in Siddhartha, it was the manner and meaning of the Divine to be yellow here, blue here, sky there, forest there, and Siddhartha here. Meaning and reality were not somewhere beyond things, they were in them, in everything.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 37)
“He mused deeply, descending to the very bottom of this sensation as if through deep water, all the way down to where the causes rest. For, it seemed to him, thinking is recognizing causes, and that is the only way in which sensations become insights: they are not lost, they become substance and begin to radiate what is within them.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 35)
“I have never doubted you for a moment, I have never doubted for a moment that you are the Buddha, that you have attained the goal, the highest, which so many thousands of Brahmins and sons of Brahmins are journeying to reach. You have found the deliverance from death. It came to you from your own seeking, on your own path, through thinking, through meditation, through knowledge, through illumination. It did not come through a teaching! And—this is my thought, O Sublime One—no one is granted deliverance through a teaching! You cannot, O Venerable One, impart to anyone, tell anyone in words and through teachings what happened to you in the hour of your illumination. The Teaching of the illuminated Buddha contains a great deal, it teaches many how to live righteously, avoid evil. But there is one thing that the so clear, so venerable Teaching does not contain: it does not contain the secret of what the Sublime One himself has experienced, he alone among the hundreds of thousands. That is what I thought and realized when I heard the Teaching. That is why I am resuming my wandering—not to seek a different, better teaching, for I know that there is none; but to leave all teachings and all teachers and to reach my goal alone or die.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page 32)
“Buddha’s Way to Salvation has often been criticized and doubted, because it is thought to be wholly grounded in cognition. True, but it’s not just intellectual cognition, not just learning and knowing, but spiritual experience that can be earned only through strict discipline in a selfless life.”
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Page xxviii)