Hermann Hesse Quotes

Nobody minds having what is too good for them.

When I was 5 years old, we had nothing in the village. One day, in front of my house, some soldiers in a big Cadillac started to do a picnic. I looked at them like they were coming from the moon. I remember they gave me a box of rice pudding - that, for me, was the American Dream.

People who have what they want are fond of telling people who haven't what they want that they really don't want it.

There is so much that people take for granted.

Like power in any shape, a full stomach always holds a dose of insolence, and this expresses itself first of all in the well-fed lecturing the starving.

You don't appreciate what you have when it all comes to you real quick. I went from nothing to everything all at once.

I am very privileged. I have everything I want and more.

Because of how I grew up and on 'Made In Chelsea,' I never had any challenge.

In the ghetto we didn't even know there was such a thing as a private jet.

The trouble with you and me my friend, is the trouble with this nation, too many blessings, too little Appreciation.

Living in Portland, which is a predominantly white city, the privilege and the luxury to be able to obsess over a certain kind of minutia, that I think, if you did not have that privilege, would never be bothersome. When people are worried about whether "local" means 100 miles, or 50 miles, or 10 miles from a grocery store, I just think, "Wow. What a privilege it is to have that as a major concern in your life." As opposed to, "Can we afford food tonight?" Sometimes I'm just shocked at what becomes concerning in these kind of communities.

I honestly don't need much money. People love to buy me drinks. Hostesses love to feed me. Famous artists lavish me with expensive artworks, and heiresses do the same with jewels that I promptly lose.

I've been very lucky - I don't come from a privileged upbringing.

I've lived an easy life, the life you dream about. And at that time I thought it was normal, but it's so far from normal.

Money came in left, right and centre; you just thought that's how it was for everyone and that's how it will always be.

When I grew up, I had everything you could ask for, and I kind of didn't appreciate it. Because it was a given for me. Everybody that grew up in my neighborhood was going to have an opportunity to go to college. I took that for granted. I always regret that.

A lot of people who are born here don't appreciate the freedoms we have, the opportunities we have, because they've never had it any other way.

We can take these things for granted, when we have everything on a plate.

I've always been less interested in the person on the top of the Bellagio than I am at the person whose house got moved to create the Bellagio.

You need to think about the system that you live in and the comforts that you have. But the comforts that you have that are causing the discomforts of a massive amount of people around the world.

For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it.

I had been hungry all the years- My noon had come, to dine- I, trembling, drew the table near And touched the curious wine. 'Twas this on tables I had seen When turning, hungry, lone, I looked in windows, for the wealth I could not hope to own. I did not know the ample bread, 'Twas so unlike the crumb The birds and I had often shared In Nature's diningroom. The plenty hurt me, 'twas so new,-- Myself felt ill and odd, As berry of a mountain bush Transplanted to the road. Nor was I hungry; so I found That hunger was a way Of persons outside windows, The entering takes away.

That's pretty tough talk from a guy who has fewer days at work this year than he has houses.

I was born into it and there was nothing I could do about it. It was there, like air or food, or any other element. The only question with wealth is what you do with it.

Satiation, like any state of vitality, always contains a degree of impudence, and that impudence emerges first and foremost when the sated man instructs the hungry one.