Hermann Hesse Quotes

Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.

The rose and the thorn, and sorrow and gladness are linked together.

I think the phrase that resonates from 'Just One Year' is something I sort of live by: 'The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.'

Duality is not a story. Duality is just a complexity.

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.

People desire to separate their worlds into polarities of dark and light, ugly and beautiful, good and evil, right and wrong, inside and outside. Polarities serve us in our learning and growth, but as souls we are all.

For everything that you find dreadful, there's usually something that is rather marvelous as well.

My perspective on life is now to try to play music that reflects that life and death are part of the same coin. And to know about life, we must really examine the function - like death. Life tells you a lot about what death is, not what people say it is.

Everybody's got that split between the beautiful and fragile, the hard and the dark.

I'm fascinated by the yin and yang of everything.

I think there's a yin and a yang to everything.

If you take the yin-yang, it has a piece of the other inside itself. You can't be too much of one thing and be balanced.

The cure for pain is in the pain. Good and bad are mixed. If you don't have both, you don't belong with us.

The rose and thorn, the treasure and dragon, joy and sorrow, all mingle into one.

I am the shore and the ocean, awaiting myself on both sides.

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is. If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death - or shall I say, death implies life - you can conceive yourself.

The light and the dark are the same. They share. They really do rub up against each other, and they are extraordinarily familiar with each other. They are actually friends.

There's a part of you that you can get a hold of, and there's a part of you that you can never get a hold of, and those are opposite things. Who are you? Which one are you? You are combinations of opposites.

Dusk is just an illusion because the sun is either above the horizon or below it. And that means that day and night are linked in a way that few things are there cannot be one without the other yet they cannot exist at the same time. How would it feel I remember wondering to be always together yet forever apart?

People ask me if I believe in things: in God, in astrology, and I say, absolutely! I believe in everything! And I believe in its opposite. Like the positive and negative volts on a battery, you need both for power.

If the fall of man consists in the separation of god and the devil the serpent must have appeared out of the middle of the apple when Eve bit like the original worm in it, splitting it in half and sundering everything which was once one into a pair of opposites, so the world is Noah's ark on the sea of eternity containing all the endless pairs of things, irreconcilable and inseparable, and heat will always long for cold and the back for the front and smiles for tears and mutt for jeff and no for yes with the most unutterable nostalgia there is.

We are not the same. But we are, somehow, one.

Across planes of consciousness, we have to live with the paradox that opposite things can be simultaneously true.

If you would behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life. For life and death are one, even as the river and sea are one.

You can't have an up without a down. You can't have a left without a right. This is duality. If you have a problem, you must already have the solution. The question is, do you really want the solution, or do you want to perpetuate the problem?