Hermann Hesse Quotes

Since human memory is short and does not suffice for a crowd of things, the authority of those who preceded our age, the divine emperors and kings, has decreed that those things were to be written down which the progress of fleeting time generally removes from the knowledge of men.

Books are the building blocks of civilization and a people without books are a people without history, a people with no story older than the tales of the oldest man or woman.

Writing preserves only the thought of literate peoples.

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

A good part of 'The Information' is about the transition from an oral to a literary culture. Books effected such a great transformation in the way we think about the world, our history, our logic, mathematics, you name it. I think we would be greatly diminished as a people and as a culture if the book became obsolete.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

Before books, nothing got saved. We don’t know what the cavemen thought about caves even though they tried to write on the walls.

Man's real genius and knowledge remains preserved in books

For people who are coming out of an oral tradition, it is very exciting to get into reading and writing and it is quite interesting how frequently people want to write their own story. Sometimes it is straight history - this is how we came about, how our town was created, a lot of that kind of effort, as soon as literacy came. The first thing you wanted to do was to put something down about who you are or how you are related to you neighbors. Then the next stage would be the stories, the cultural part of the story: this is the kind of world our ancestors made or aspired to.

When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren't told or books weren't written, man would live like the beasts, only for the day.

In Western Civilization, our elders are books.

Pale ink is better than the most retentive memory. If it's written down, you can look it up. Just be damn sure you write it down.

Books are the building blocks of civilization, for without the written word, a man knows nothing beyond what occurs during his own brief years and, perhaps, in a few tales his parents tell him.

I never wrote anything down. I never kept a diary, never kept a journal. I did write one letter home about touring with the Doors that I used as a reference for the book for some details there, and then I was glad I had that, but that was it.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.

It was a wise and useful provision of the ancients to transmit their thoughts to posterity by recording them in treatises, so that they should not be lost, but, being developed in succeeding generations through publications in books, should gradually attain in later times, to the highest refinement of learning.

Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.

The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.

The images of mens wits and knowledge remain in books. They generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages

If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.

I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.

But there is no end to the praise of books, to the value of the library. Who shall estimate their influence on our population where all the millions read and write ? It is the joy of nations that man can communicate all his thoughts, discoveries and virtues to records that may last for centuries.

Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.

Books served to keep hard-won knowledge safe. They endured.