Hermann Hesse - Human Quotes

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To such men the desperate and horrible thought has come that perhaps the whole of human life is but a bad joke, a violent and ill-fated abortion of the primal mother, a savage and dismal catastophe of nature.

Hermann Hesse
The human attitude of which classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory over blind change. Classical music as gesture signifies knowledge of the tragedy of the human condition, affirmation of human destiny, courage, cheerful serenity.

Hermann Hesse
You learned people and artists have, no doubt, all sorts of superior things in your heads; but you're human beings like the rest of us, and we, too, have our dreams and fancies.

Hermann Hesse
Every important cultural gesture comes down to a morality, a model for human behavior concentrated into a gesture.

Hermann Hesse
What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men – each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature – are shot down wholesale.

Hermann Hesse
What a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and men — each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature — are therefore shot wholesale nowadays.

Hermann Hesse
Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.

Hermann Hesse
We aren't pigs as you seem to think, but human beings. We create gods and struggle with them, and they bless us.

Hermann Hesse
There was once a man, Harry, called the steppenwolf. He went on two legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in reality a wolf of the steppes. He had learned a good deal of all that people of a good intelligence can, and was a fairly clever fellow. What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life.

Hermann Hesse
Each of us is merely one human being, merely an experiment, a way station. But each of us should be on the way toward perfection, should be striving to reach the center, not the periphery.

Hermann Hesse
You wouldn't consider all the bipeds you pass on the street human beings simply because they walk upright and carry their young in their bellies nine months! It is obvious how many of them are fish or sheep, worms or angels, how many are ants, how many are fish or sheep, worms or angels, how contains the possibility of becoming human, partially even by learning to make himself conscious of them; only in this respect are these possibilities his.

Hermann Hesse
Now what we call bourgeois, when regarded as an element always to be found in human life, is nothing else than the search for a balance. It is the striving after a mean between the countless extremes and opposite that arise in human conduct.

Hermann Hesse
The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life.

Hermann Hesse
Each man carries the vestiges of his birth; the slime and eggshells of his primeval past with him to the end of his days. Some never become human, remaining frog, lizard, ant. Some are human above the waist, fish below.

Hermann Hesse