Hermann Hesse Quotes

He saw merchants trading, princes hunting, mourners wailing for their dead, whores offering themselves, physicians trying to help the sick, priests determining the most suitable day for seeding, lovers loving, mothers nursing their children—and all of this was not worthy of one look from his eye, it all lied, it all stank, it all stank of lies, it all pretended to be meaningful and joyful and beautiful, and it all was just concealed putrefaction. The world tasted bitter. Life was torture

One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.

There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death -those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement- been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.

He looked as though his life had not only passed him by but paused along the way to spit in his face.

Tired with all these for restful death I cry, As to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimmed in jollity, And purest faith unhappily forsworn.

What is more miserable than discontent?

Life is a long drawn out lie, with a sniffling sigh at the end of it.

There are no greater wretches in the world than many of those whom people in general take to be happy.

There's a hole in the world Like a great black pit And the vermin of the world Inhabit it ... And it goes by the name of London.

To long for that which comes not. To lie a-bed and sleep not. To serve well and please not. To have a horse that goes not. To have a man obeys not. To lie in jail and hope not. To be sick and recover not. To lose one's way and know not. To wait at door and enter not, and to have a friend we trust not: are ten such spites as hell hath not.

Whose hearts must I break? What lies must I maintain? - Through whose blood am I to wade ?

Whatever we had is over. It died the minute I walked downstairs and realized the world I'd always known was a lie.- Blaire Wynn

I tell the gods are still alive / And they are not consoling.

Hell is no other but a soundlesse pit, Where no one beame of comfort peeps in it.

O let me be undone the common way, And have the common comfort to be pity'd, And not be ruin'd in the mask of bliss, And so be envy'd, and be wretched too!

Hope is a demon worse than your Pain.

Reality is crushing. The world is a wrong-sized shoe. How can anyone stand it?

Destroy yourselves, you who are desperate, and you who are tortured in body and soul, abandon all hope. There is no more solace for you in this world. The world lives off your rotting flesh.

The world consists of imaginary people, claiming imaginary virtues and suffering from imaginary happiness.

There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering--a hell of boredom.

I turned to speak to God About the world's despair But to make bad matters worse I found God wasn't there.

Who looks at me, beholdeth sorrows all, All pain, all torture, woe and all distress; I have no need on other harms to call, As anguish, languor, cruel bitterness, Discomfort, dread, and madness more and less; Methinks from heaven above the tears must rain In pity for my harsh and cruel pain.

weltschmerz: its the depression you feel when the world as it is does not line up with the world as you think it should be.

The truth now.He was disappointed in human beings.He had seen too many betrayals,too many pitiful weaknesses,too much greed for money and fame.The falseness between lovers,husbands and wifes,fathers,sons,mothers,daughters