"It is because the reality that I once experienced, together with my comrades, exists no longer, and although its memories are the most precious and vivid ones that I possess, they seem so far away, they are composed of such a different kind of fabric, that it seems as if they originated on other stars in other millennia, or as if they were hallucinations."

Journey To The East (1932) by Hermann Hesse

"A similar thing has already happened to so many other people; great and famous men have shared the same fate as this young man. Once in their youth the light shone for them; they saw the light and followed the star, but then came reason and the mockery of the world; then came faint-heartedness and apparent failure; then came weariness and disillusionment, and so they lost their way again, they became blind again."

Journey To The East (1932) by Hermann Hesse

"My tale becomes even more difficult because we not only wandered through Space, but also though Time. We moved towards the East, but we also travelled into the Middle Ages and the Golden Age; we roamed through Italy or Switzerland, but at times we also spent the night in the 10th century and dwelt with the patriarchs or the fairies… For our goal was not only the East, or rather the East was not only a country and something geographical, but it was the home and youth of the soul, it was everywhere and nowhere, it was the union of all times."

Journey To The East (1932) by Hermann Hesse

"Finally, at the top of the immense building, we arrived at a garret-storey, which smelled of paper and cardboard, and all along the walls for many hundreds of yards protruded cupboard-doors, backs of books and bundles of documents: a gigantic archive, a vast chancery… It seemed to me as if the whole world, including the starry heavens, was governed or at least recorded and observed from there."

Journey To The East (1932) by Hermann Hesse

"As blue as snow,
Is Paul like Klee."

Journey To The East (1932) by Hermann Hesse

"Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to understand and vindicate human life. Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding and to fulfil their requirements. Children live one one side of despair, the awakened on the other side."

Journey To The East (1932) by Hermann Hesse

"A heron flew over the bamboo wood and Siddhartha took the heron into his soul, flew over forest and mountains, became a heron, ate fishes, suffered heron hunger, used heron language and died a heron’s death. A dead jackal lay on the sandy sore and Siddhartha’s soul slipped into its corpse; he became a dead jackal, lay on the shore, swelled, stank, decayed, was dismembered by hyenas, was picked at by vultures, became a skeleton, became dust, mingled with the atmosphere. And Siddhartha’s soul returned, died, decayed, turned into dust, experiences the troubled course of the life cycle. He waited with new thirst like a hunter at a chasm where the life cycle ends, where there is an end to causes, where painless eternity begins. He killed his senses, he killed his memory, he slipped out of his Self in a thousand different forms. He was animal, carcass, stone, wood, water, and each time he reawakened. The sun or moon shone, he was again Self, swung into the life cycle, felt thirst, conquered thirst, felt new thirst."

Siddhartha (1922) by Hermann Hesse

Siddhartha (1922) by Hermann Hesse