And it’s strange, all the things that I’ve run from
Are the things that completeness could come from
- Do Not Let Your Spirit Wane, Gang of Youths
“We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to
recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and
complement.”
― Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund
“Some day you will think of what I am going to say to you now: our friendship has no other purpose, no other
reason, than to show you how utterly unlike me you are.”
― Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund
“I am superior to you only in one point: I'm awake, whereas you are only half awake, or completely asleep
sometimes. I call a man awake who knows in his conscious reason his innermost unreasonable force, drives, and
weaknesses and knows how to deal with them.”
― Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
- Rumi. ugh
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
wild geese by mary oliver, pretty nice
“It cannot be denied that he was generally very unhappy; and he could make others unhappy also, that is, when he
loved them or they him. For all who got to love him, saw always only the one side in him. Many loved him as a
refined and clever and interesting man, and were horrified and disappointed when they had come upon the wolf in
him. And they had to because Harry wished, as every sentient being does, to be loved as a whole and therefore it
was just, with those whose love he most valued that he could least of all conceal and belie the wolf.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
“Ask the river about it, my friend! Listen to it, laugh about it! Do you then really think that you have
committed your follies in order to spare your son them? Can you then protect your son from Samsara? How? Through
instruction, through prayers, through exhortation? My dear friend, have you forgotten that instructive story
about Siddhartha, the Brahmin's son, which you once told me here? Who protected Siddhartha the Samana from
Samsara, from sin, greed and folly? Could his father's piety, his teacher's exhortations, his own knowledge, his
own seeking, protect him? Which father, which teacher, could prevent him from living his own life, from soiling
himself with life, from loading himself with sin, from swallowing the bitter drink himself, from finding his own
path? Do you think, my dear friend, that anybody is spared this path? Perhaps your little son, because you would
like to see him spared sorrow and pain and disillusionment? But if you were to die ten times for him, you would
not alter his destiny in the slightest.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
hermann hesse, my favourite author, and löwe, his favourite cat