Hermann Hesse Quotes

...became a woman who learned her own skin and dug into her soul and found it full.

I am a seeker, a poor, sinful creature, there is no weaker than I.

The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation.

I notice that Autumn is more the season of the soul than of nature.

Yes, you who must leave everything that you cannot control, It begins with your family, and soon it comes round to your soul. Well I've been where you're hanging, I think I can see how you're pinned: When you're not feeling holy your loneliness says that you've sinned.

Those doing soul work, who want the searing truth more than solace or applause, know each other right away. Those who want something else turn and take a seat in another room. Soul-makers find each other’s company.

My national service is part of my training for freeing my soul from the bondage of the flesh.

For souls in growth, great quarrels are great emancipations.

People tell me it's a sin, to know and feel too much within.

The truth was that I could not manage my soul, and I was becoming aware of old age because of my weakness in the face of love.

To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese.

He, then, that would really, thoroughly, and acceptably mortify any disquieting lust, let him take care to be equally diligent in all parts of obedience, and know that every lust, every omission of duty, is burdensome to God, though but one is so to him.

He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice's spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought "Am I led; am I leading?" Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.

Enlightenment does not ask you to be perfect; it simply asks you to find perfection right where you stand.

You want to eliminate your evil desires in order to reveal your Buddha nature, but where will you throw them away?

From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.

A new conception of life cannot be imposed on men; it can only be freely assimilated. And it can only be freely assimilated in two ways: one spiritual and internal, the other experimental and external.

It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.

Spiritual progress is like detoxification. Things have to come up in order to be released. Once we have asked to be healed, then our unhealed places are forced to the surface.

The price that has to be paid for finding truly personal life is a very high one. It is a price in terms of the acceptance of responsibility. And the awareness of responsibility inevitably leads either to despair or to confession and grace.

Fight with yourself when you paint, not with the model. A student is one who struggles with himself for order.

We can't fight darkness with darkness. We have to find compassion, and embrace the darkness inside of us in order to understand it and, ultimately, to transcend it.

I didn't have any definition of self. I never fit in, so I started pretending I was other people. I'd find people I thought were cool and dress how they dressed, talk how they talked, do whatever they were into. This led to a period of drugs and anchohol. When his family gave him an ultimatum to get clean or they'd report him to the police Corey said, "I was done fighting myself. I finally said, "I'm gonna start looking at my life and figure out why I'm doing this.

The road to your soul is through your heart.