Hermann Hesse Quotes

It is useless to contend with the irresistible power of Time, which goes on continually creating by a process of constant destruction.

Man passes; he knows that he is dust; nothing is more evident than his frailty. If he should for a single moment forget it, what a chorus of voices would recall it to him! And yet, in the drop of existence which he absorbs, he takes in ages through memory and ages through presentiment. In the moments as they pass, he dimly sees eternity, and more than this, he possesses it by anticipation.

If man reflects on the changes and transformations which follow one another like wave after wave and their rapidity, he will despise everything which is perishable.

Time takes all and gives all.

Time stays, we go.

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?

Life and death are illusions. We are in a constant state of transformation.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Did you know that today will never be tomorrow.

There's a harsh reality - nothing lasts forever. You have to be ready to grow, and grow fast.

The closer we come to the negative, to death, the more we blossom.

I'm going to die one day. I know it's coming for me, too. I'll be a mountain, I'll be a stone on the beach. I'll be nourishment.

We can change everything but we can't stop time.

Nature obliges everything to change about. One thing crumbles and falls in the weakness of age; Another grows in its place from a negligible start. So time alters the whole nature of the world And earth passes from one state to another.

Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.

Body is the name of a series of changes.

We look at mountains and call them eternal, and they seem... but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, starts fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.

Reflect often upon the rapidity with which all existing things, or things coming into existence, sweep past us and are carried away.

All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time.

Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.

Time bears away all things.

Lives are mere blips on the canvas of eternity.

Constantly contemplate the whole of time and the whole of substance, and consider that all individual things as to substance are a grain of a fig, and as to time the turning of a gimlet .

Nothing that is can pause or stay; / The moon will wax, the moon will wane, / The mist and cloud will turn to rain, / The rain to mist and cloud again, / Tomorrow be today.