Hermann Hesse Quotes

Sometimes we get comfortable with the status quo, even when the status quo isn’t any good.

If you are foolish enough to be contented, don't show it, but grumble with the rest.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

I really have the American dream licked.

The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

Many who seem to be struggling with adversity are happy; many, amid great affluence, are utterly miserable.

Money can't buy you happiness but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.

The higher up I went, the less happy I was.

I guess I have never been much of a complainer. You just take what is given you, and don't complain about what you can't affect.

Contemporary Americans were so prosperous, so happily distracted by such a richness of vivid entertainments, they were reluctant to have their fun diminished by acknowledging that anything existed with fangs and fierce appetites. If now and then they recognized a wolf, they threw a bone to it and convinced themselves it was a dog.

Boredom, after all, is a form of criticism.

Happiness is best defined by its antonym, which is less 'unhappiness' than 'anxiety.' Anyone who is not oppressed by intolerable worry or grievous pain is almost certainly happy, whether rich or poor, well or ill, successful or frustrated.

Being quiet is comfortable. Keeping things the way they've been is comfortable. And all comfort has done is maintain the status quo.

We live in a time of extremes. People think that, on a scale of 1-10, if they're not at a 10 for happy, they're not happy.

I don't question things when they're going right.

Happiness is dangerous. If you're happy, you're content, and if you're content, you can become complacent.

If you decide to just go with the flow, you'll end up where the flow goes, which is usually downhill, often leading to a big pile of sludge and a life of unhappiness. You'll end up doing what everyone else is doing.

Stop talking about the way things are, unless you like them.

By the time I was in my early teens, we were able to move into a much more middle-class area. I had a comfortable adolescence.

Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middle-class men and woman who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will least forever or else are so frightened it won't, that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.

It is so much easier to live placidly and complacently. Of course, to live placidly and complacently is not to live at all.

To the mediocre, mediocrity is a form of happiness.

Show me someone content with mediocrity and I'll show you someone destined for failure.

Today millions of people are living who will never do it again. Millions are being born for the first time - and millions are doing nothing because it's the best offer they've had this week. It is for these people and many others that the Surprise Party is conceived and desecrated, founded upon the principle that everybody is just as good as anybody else, even though they aren't quite so smart.

We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution.