Hermann Hesse Quotes

Books are the building blocks of civilization and a people without books are a people without history, a people with no story older than the tales of the oldest man or woman.

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.

Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it, the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing, we would be naked on earth.

The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a metaphor, not just for books but for ideas, for language, for knowledge, for beauty, for all the things that make us human, for collecting memory.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.

Paper is at the center of so many of the elements of the development of civilization.

Reading is essential to human life. When the last reader dies, humanity will be at an end.

Literature is the memory of humanity.

But a man is not forgotten, as long as there are two people left under the sky. One, to tell the story; the other, to hear it.

Poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization - carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language.

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.

Storytelling is the oldest form of education.

Of course, one way of thinking about all of life and civilization is as being about how the world registers and processes information. Certainly that's what sex is about; that's what history is about.

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

Libraries keep the records on behalf of all humanity. the unique and the absurd, the wise and the fragments of stupidity.

Look at anyone's bookcase at home, no matter how modest, and you're going to find a book that contains wisdom or ideas or a language that's at least a thousand years old. And the idea that humans have created a mechanism to time travel, to hurl ideas into the future, it sort of bookends. Books are a time machine.

What is true for book publishing is true for civilization: the books that survive the test of time are humanity's backlist, our collective memory.

May books spread the world over!

We know the past and its great events, the present in its multitudinous complications, chiefly through faith in the testimony of others.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

I do not speak Hebrew, but I understand that it has no word for 'history.' The closest word for it is memory.

History is information. Memory is part of your identity.

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

Poetry is the elder sister of history, the mother of language, the ancestress of civilization.