Hermann Hesse Quotes

I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.

When one's dead, one's dead... This squirrel will become earth all in his time. And still later on, there'll grow new trees from him, with new squirrels skipping about in them. Do you think that's so very sad?

There is no such thing as death. In nature nothing dies. From each sad remnant of decay, some forms of life arise so shall his life be taken away before he knoweth that he hath it.

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

This is the spot where I will lie When life has had enough of me, These are the grasses that will blow Above me like a living sea. These gay old lilies will not shrink To draw their life from death of mine, And I will give my body's fire To make blue flowers on this vine. "O Soul," I said, "have you no tears? Was not the body dear to you?" I heard my soul say carelessly, "The myrtle flowers will grow more blue.

Think of a lifeless forest in which a small plant pushes its head upward, out of the ruin. In our grief process, we are moving into life from death, without denying the devastation that came before.

From every ruin, life springs up again and everything that dies is born again.

I tell of hearts and souls and dances... Butterflies and second chances; Desperate ones and dreamers bound, Seeking life from barren ground, Who suffer on in earthly fate The bitter pain of agony hate, Might but they stop and here forgive Would break the bonds to breathe and live And find that God in goodness brings A chance for change, the hope of wings To rest in Him, and self to die And so become a butterfly.

All death in nature is birth, and at the moment of death appears visibly the rising of life. There is no dying principle in nature, for nature throughout is unmixed life, which, concealed behind the old, begins again and develops itself. Death as well as birth is simply in itself, in order to present itself ever more brightly and more like to itself.

The alchemist was dazed and dumbfounded, as the true meaning of the magic was revealed: *The dead will rise from glade to glen and ancient will be young again*. The dead had, after all, risen. From dead and dry things there was growth, and new life everywhere. And the endlessly long winter had at last turned to spring. From life to death and back again to life. It was indeed the greatest magic in the world.

In one bold stroke, forgiveness obliterates the past and permits us to enter the land of new beginnings.

If we openly declare what is wrong with us, what is our deepest need, then perhaps the death and despair will by degrees disappear.

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly.

Death is the prerequisite to resurrection, the new life God intends.

Step on the moist, pillowsoft earth, walking gingerly aside a weeping steam that calls your name, for it knows how to heal a wounded heart.

You know Americans are obsessed with life and death and rebirth, that's the American Cycle. You know, awakening, tragic, horrible death and then Phoenix rising from the ashes. That's the American story, again and again.

In nature, there is less death and destruction than death and transmutation.

Die and born again, die and born again. It's the story of my life.

Hawaii is such a wonderful, healing place for me. I feel so at ease with the natives and love the tranquility of the islands. It is a place to find inner peace and be one with nature.

There is an Easter sense in which all things are made new in the risen Christ. A tiny gleam of this is reflected in all true art.

Flowers are reincarnation. They come out of the earth of our ashes. Nothing else looks so soul-like.

Even if it means oblivion, friends, I'll welcome it, because it won't be nothing. We'll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we'll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we'll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.

To be born again is to let the past go, and look without condemnation upon the present.