Hermann Hesse Quotes

We have the notion that we exist but we have no way to prove it. 'I am' is the closest foundation we can get.

There is no frontier between being and appearing.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

Words are men's daughters, but God's sons are things.

There may not be one Truth - there may be several truths - but saying that is not to say that reality doesn't exist.

Truth is in things, and not in words.

The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

Being is the great explainer.

The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.

I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?

All appearances are real and negatio; sophistical: All reality must be sensation.

There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

The world is real. Consciousness is the illusion.

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

Life is an illusion. I am held together in the nothingness by art.

I think that reality exists and that it's knowable.

The German language speaks Being, while all the others merely speak of Being.

Whoever says he is starting from a given in nature may be right, and so is he who says he is starting from nothing!

I think art is more glorious than life but not more real.

First, philosophy concerns itself with all kinds of issues that don't get much airtime in day-to-day life. What's the nature of reality? Can we ever truly know anything, and if so, how? What does it mean to be a moral agent? And while we're at it, is there any such thing as agency anyway?

There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.