Hermann Hesse Quotes

Beijing was a huge slap in the face, and it forced me to look at myself. I have to realise that this is my life.

I think that one morning, the Papess woke in her tower, and her blankets were so warm, and the sun was so golden, she could not bear it. I think she woke, and dressed, and washed her face in cold water, and rubbed her shaven head. I think she walked among her sisters, and for the first time saw that they were so beautiful, and she loved them. I think she woke up one morning of all her mornings, and found that her heart was as white as a silkworm, and the sun was clear as glass on her brow, and she believed then that she could live, and hold peace in her hand like a pearl.

The emptiness where I used pain to fill the hole no longer controls me, no longer calls me because of you.

Once you know the truth, you can’t ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.

Learn the lesson of your own pain--learn to seek God, not in any single event of past history, but in your own soul--in the constant verifications of experience, in the life of Christian love.

When you understand, that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.

My soul is not a palace of the past.

In the process of letting go you will lose many things from the past, but you will find yourself.

All these years you've been searching and looking and trying to change things, trying to add thing onto yourself, trying to acquire things when you have been the source of everything to begin with. Everything you've been looking for has been within yourself you have been that. You then begin to surrender everything to yourself. You surrender all of your thoughts, all of your feelings, you surrender all of your desires, all of your wants to the Self. You pull it in all inwardly.

I've been in those relationships. You go through years of your life and at a certain point you wake up and you go, god, what am I doing here? What have I spent the last three years doing? Part of it is learning, this process you've gotta go through. You have to recognize the point at which you're not learning anymore, and be able to let it go.

Leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can't do that until your life has grown roots.

You must dare to disassociate yourself from those who would delay your journey... Leave, depart, if not physically, then mentally. Go your own way, quietly, undramatically, and venture toward Trueness at last.

Every uncomfortable feeling, every pain, every moment of stress & suffering is for your own self-realizatio n.

No-strings relationships have helped cure me of love addiction. All my life I've been in long-term monogamous relationships. I had to break that pattern by not allowing myself to have a relationship for a year, stopping myself from committing to men. I haven't been celibate. I've had lots of dates and lots of sex, but I haven't been pushing to turn a date into a relationship. This has been a huge thing for me.

You can only begin where you find yourself

Our true and genuine wisdom can be summed up as the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves.

Break through the bonds of your past.

What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.

All my life I used to wonder what I would become when I grew up. Then, about seven years ago, I realized that I was never going to grow up--that growing is an ever ongoing process.

The big truth for men is that often we have to leave home in the first half of life before we can return home at a later stage and find our soul there.

Yes, know thyself: in great concerns or small, be this thy care, for this, my friend, is all.

We meet no Stranger, but Ourself.

Without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.

I had experiences along the way that helped me to realize that letting go was the way that worked for me to find something that I, personally, as a reader, love to read.