Hermann Hesse Quotes

I wasn't unhappy, but I was a little like: 'Is this it? Really?' I was thirsty.

I'm never content, and I don't know if that's a curse or a good thing.

It's a blessing and a curse, 'cause I'm never satisfied, so I continually want to outdo myself. But still, I'm never happy.

No one is ever satisfied where he is.

The discontented man finds no easy chair.

Nothing is more certain than that improvement in human affairs is wholly the work of the uncontented characters.

It doesn't matter what I'm doing - I wish it was something else. If I'm producing, I wish I was directing. If I'm directing, I wish I was doing almost anything else!

So much of my intention with songs is to voice a continual dissatisfaction, or at least to claw my way out of it.

I never want to be satisfied.

That's the thing with me: I'm never satisfied.

I'm not one to be satisfied.

No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.

The highly ambitious person, in spite of all his successes, always remains dissatisfied, in the same way as a greedy baby is never satisfied.

The whole society depends on creating ambition in you. Ambition means a conflict, ambition means that whatsoever you are, you are wrong - you have to be somewhere else. Wherever you are, you are wrong - you have to be somewhere else. A constant madness to be somewhere else, to be somebody else, is what ambition is.

Her blog was doing well, with thousands of unique visitors each month, and she was earning good speaking fees, and she had a fellowship at Princeton and a relationship with Blaine - "You are the absolute love of my life," he'd written in her last birthday card - and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.

The human being is constantly torn from calm and peace of simple existence by two things; wanting what you don't have, or disliking what you have.

When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he'd even bothered.

We are never content with our lot.

If you look around the world and I can tell you right now that the majority of the planet is focused on certainty and significance. And those two absolutely guarantee unhappiness. Because if you're driven by significance, it doesn't matter what you achieve, it's never enough.

No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.

It's hard to be ambitious if you're content, isn't it?

I'd never been content in America.

I can't live just being content. I can't have a routine. I can't be settled because then I just get really frustrated.

He that is discontented in one place will seldom be happy in another.

I suppose I was always very greedy. I was never happy with what we had, and I was always looking for new opportunities.