Quotes From "The Glass Bead Game" By Hermann Hesse

Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding, ” Joseph exclaimed. “If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn’t there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?” The master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said: “There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht - I can see that they already have begun. . Hermann Hesse

The old man slowly raised himself from the piano stool, fixed those cheerful blue eyes piercingly and at the same time with unimaginable friendliness upon him, and said: "Making music together is the best way for two people to become friends. There is none easier. That is a fine thing. I hope you and I shall remain friends. Perhaps you too will learn how to make fugues, Joseph. Hermann Hesse

If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything is tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn't there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?" Joseph Knect said to his Music Master "there is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend rather, you should long for perfection in yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived not taught . Hermann Hesse

There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Hermann Hesse

Сè проÑ‚ивречи едно на друго, сè проÑ‚рчува едно крај друго, никаде нема сигурносÑ‚. Сè може да се Ñ‚олкува вака, и сè може да се Ñ‚олкува обраÑ‚но. СеÑ‚а човечка исÑ‚орија може да се проÑ‚олкува како развој и напредок, а исÑ‚овремено без да се види нешÑ‚о повеќе од пропасÑ‚ и глупосÑ‚. Зар нема висÑ‚ина? Зар не посÑ‚ои висÑ‚инска и валидна наука?. Hermann Hesse

Times of terror and the deepest misery may arrive, but if there is to be any happiness in this misery it can only be a spiritual happiness, related to the past in the rescue of the culture of early ages and to the future in a serene and indefatigable championship of the spirit in a time which would otherwise completely swallow up the material. Hermann Hesse

When I composed those verses I was preoccupied less with music than with an experience–an experience in which that beautiful musical allegory had shown its moral side, had become an awakening and a summons to a life vocation. The imperative form of the poem which specially displeases you is not the expression of a command and a will to teach but a command and warning directed towards myself. Even if you were not fully aware of this, my friend, you could have read it in the closing lines. I experienced an insight, you see, a realization and an inner vision, and wished to impress and hammer the moral of this vision into myself. That is the reason why this poem has remained in my memory. Whether the verses are good or bad they have achieved their aim, for the warning has lived on within me and has not been forgotten. It rings anew for me again to-day, and that is a wonderful little experience which your scorn cannot take away from me. . Hermann Hesse

And many years later, as an adult student of history, Knecht was to perceive more distinctly that history cannot come into being without the substance and the dynamism of this sinful world of egoism and instinctuality, and that even such sublime creations as the Order were born in this cloudy torrent and sooner or later will be swallowed up by it again.. Nor was this ever merely an intellectual problem for him. Rather, it engaged his innermost self more than any other problem, and he felt it as partly his responsibility. His was one of those natures which can sicken, languish, and die when they see an ideal they have believed in, or the country and community they love, afflicted with ills. . Hermann Hesse

Tegularius was a willful, moody person who refused to fit into his society. Every so often he would display the liveliness of his intellect. When highly stimulated he could be entrancing; his mordant wit sparkled and he overwhelmed everyone with the audacity and richness of his sometimes somber inspirations. But basically he was incurable, for he did not want to be cured; he cared nothing for co-ordination and a place in the scheme of things. He loved nothing but his freedom, his perpetual student status, and preferred spending his whole life as the unpredictable and obstinate loner, the gifted fool and nihilist, to following the path of subordination to the hierarchy and thus attaining peace. He cared nothing for peace, had no regard for the hierarchy, hardly minded reproof and isolation. Certainly he was a most inconvenient and indigestible component in a community whose idea was harmony and orderliness. But because of this very troublesomeness and indigestibility he was, in the midst of such a limpid and prearranged little world, a constant source of vital unrest, a reproach, an admonition and warning, a spur to new, bold, forbidden, intrepid ideas, an unruly, stubborn sheep in the herd. Hermann Hesse

His way had therefore come full circle, or rather had taken the form of an ellipse or a spiral, following as ever no straight unbroken line, for the rectilinear belongs only to Geometry and not to Nature and Life. Hermann Hesse

He read the veinings of a leaf, the pattern on a mushroom cap, and divined mysteries, relations, futures, possibilities: the magic of symbols, the foreshadowing of numbers and writing, the reduction of infinitudes and multiplicities to simplicity, to system, to concept. For all these ways of comprehending the world through the mind no doubt lay within him, nameless, unnamed, but not inconceivable, not beyond the bounds of presentiment, still in the germ, but essential to his nature, part of him, growing organically within him. And if we were to go still further back beyond this Rainmaker and his time which to us seems so early and primitive, if we were to go several thousand years further back into the past, wherever we found man we would still find - this is our firm belief - the mind of man, that mind which has no beginning and always has contained everything that it later produces. Hermann Hesse

And those of us who trust ourselves the least, Who doubt and question most, these, it may be, Will make their mark upon eternity, And youth will turn to them as to a feast. The time may come when a man who confessed His self-doubts will be ranked among the blessed Who never suffered anguish or knew fear, Whose times were times of glory and good cheer, Who lived like children, simple happy lives. For in us too is part of that Eternal MindWhich through the aeons calls to brothers of its kind: Both you and I will pass, but it survives. Hermann Hesse

What I am in search of is not so much the gratification of a curiosity or a passion for worldly life, but something far less conditional. I do not wish to go out into the world with an insurance policy in my pocket guaranteeing my return in the event of a disappointment, like some cautious traveller who would be content with a brief glimpse of the world. On the contrary, I desire that there should be hazards, difficulties and dangers to face; I am hungry for reality, for tasks and deeds, and also for privation and suffering. Hermann Hesse

Even more remote from his way of thinking, even more impossible than any other thought, would have been words such as this: “Is it only I alone who have created this experience, or is it objective reality? Does the Master have the same feelings as I, or would mine amuse him? Are my thoughts new, unique, my own, or have the Master and many before him experienced and thought exactly the same?” No, for him there were no such analyses and differentiations. Everything was reality, was steeped in reality, full of it as bread dough is of yeast. Hermann Hesse

Granted, there is always much that is hidden, and we must not forget that the writing of history - however dryly it is done and however sincere the desire for objectivity - remains literature. History's third dimension is always fiction Hermann Hesse

To deal with history [life] means to abandon one's self to chaos but to retain a belief in the ordination and the meaning. It is a very serious task. Hermann Hesse

No permanence is ours; we are a wave That flows to fit whatever form it finds: Through night or day, cathedral or the cave We pass forever, craving form that binds. Hermann Hesse

Possibly the apparent relapse they had suffered was not a fall and a cause for suffering, but a leap forward and a positive act. Hermann Hesse

We know from several statements of Knecht's that he wanted to write the former Master's biography, but official duties left him no time for such a task. He had learned to curb his own wishes. Once he remarked to one of his tutors: "It is a pity that you students aren't fully aware of the luxury and abundance in which you live. But I was exactly the same when I was still a student. We study and work, don't waste much time, and think we may rightly call ourselves industrious—but we are scarcely conscious of all we could do, all that we might make of our freedom. Then we suddenly receive a call from the hierarchy, we are needed, are given a teaching assignment, a mission, a post, and from then on move up to a higher one, and unexpectedly find ourselves caught in a network of duties that tightens the more we try to move inside it. All the tasks are in themselves small, but each one has to be carried out at its proper hour, and the day has far more tasks than hours. That is well; one would not want it to be different. But if we ever think, between classrooms, Archives, secretariat, consulting room, meetings, and official journeys—if we ever think of the freedom we possessed and have lost, the freedom for self-chosen tasks, for unlimited, far-flung studies, we may well feel the greatest yearning for those days, and imagine that if we ever had such freedom again we would fully enjoy its pleasures and potentialities. Hermann Hesse

..the Master and the boy followed each other as if drawn along the wires of some mechanism, until soon it could no longer be discerned which was coming and which going, which following and which leading, the old or the young man. Now it seemed to be the young man who showed honour and obedience to the old man, to authority and dignity; now again it was apparently the old man who was required to follow, serve, worship the figure of youth, of beginning, of mirth. And as he watched this at once senseless and significant dream circle, the dreamer felt alternately identical with the old man and the boy, now revering and now revered, now leading, now obeying; and in the course of these pendulum shifts there came a moment in which he was both, was simultaneously Master and small pupil; or rather he stood above both, was the instigator, conceiver, operator, and onlooker of the cycle, this futile spinning race between age and youth. Hermann Hesse

Nothing is harder yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born. Spoken by Albertus Secundus in "Das Glasperlenspiel Hermann Hesse

When the world is at peace, when all things are tranquil and all men obey their superiors in all their courses, then music can be perfected. When desires and passions do not turn into wrongful paths, music can be perfected. Perfect music has its cause. It arises from equilibrium. Equilibrium arises from righteousness, and righteousness arises from the meaning of the cosmos. Therefore one can speak about music only with a man who has perceived the meaning of the cosmos. Hermann Hesse