Saturday, September 02, 2006
Hermann Hesse
via WikiquoteDemian (1919)
We aren't pigs as you seem to think, but human beings. We create gods and struggle with them, and they bless us.Siddhartha (1922)
I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of desired imaginary world, some imaginary vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, to love it and be glad to belong to it.Narcissus and Goldmund (1930)
How mysterious this life was, how deep and muddy its waters ran, yet how clear and noble what emerged from them.
The Glass Bead Game (1943)
How alien our country has become from her noblest Province and how unfaithful to that Province's spirit; how far body and soul, ideal and reality have moved apart in our country; how little they know about each other, or want to know.General
My instinct as an individualist and artist has always warned me most urgently against this capacity of men for becoming drunk on collective suffering, collective pride, collective hatred, and collective honor. When this morbid exaltation becomes perceptible in a room, a hall, a village, a city, or a country, I grow cold and distrustful; a shudder comes over me, for already, while most of my fellow men are still weeping with rapture and enthusiasm, still cheering and venting protestations of brotherhood, I see blood flowing and cities going up in flames.
