Hermann Hesse

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.

You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation… and that is called loving. Well then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is only your aversion to it that hurts, nothing else.

Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.

I don’t like when there’s too much conversation because I’m shy and it makes me uncomfortable.

Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia.

Some days, your perfume falls from your skin and settles in the staircase. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stopped on the fourth step and felt all the ways I’ve fallen in love with you.

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.

A mistake is to commit a misunderstanding.

Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table.

Understanding is simple. Knowing is complicated.

It is just good practice to do a situational scan and have situational awareness when you are out in the world.

It is just like man’s vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.

Life’s three best teachers: heartbreak, empty pocket, failures.

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

Life begets life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.

If only I had known then the speed with which she could die, maybe I wouldn’t have become the hemlock.

Greatest thing we can produce is character. Everything else can be taken from us, but not our character.