The road of excess leads to the palace of Wisdom

"You consider yourself odd at times, you accuse yourself of taking a road different from most people. You have to unlearn that. Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak, surrender to them, don’t ask first whether it’s permitted or would please your teachers or father, or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that. That way you will become earthbound, a vegetable."

Reblogged from hermannhesse

Hermann Hesse, Demian.  (via hermannhesse)

(Source: constellation-funk)

"This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great masses of people, unable to have direct contact with more satisfying means of living, take life vicariously, as readers, spectators, passive observers: a world where people watch shadow-heroes and heroines in order to forget their own clumsiness or coldness in love, where they behold brutal men crushing out life in a strike riot, a wrestling ring or a military assault, while they lack the nerve even to resist the petty tyranny of their immediate boss: where they hysterically cheer the flag of their political state, and in their neighborhood, their trades union, their church, fail to perform the most elementary duties of citizenship.
Living thus, year in and year out, at second hand, remote from the nature that is outside them and no less remote from the nature within, handicapped as lovers and as parents by the routine of the metropolis and by the constant specter of insecurity and death that hovers over its bold towers and shadowed streets - living thus the mass of inhabitants remain in a state bordering on the pathological. They become victims of phantasms, fears, obsessions, which bind them to ancestral patterns of behavior."

Reblogged from fuckyeahexistentialism

Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (via fuckyeahexistentialism)

"I just wanted to live what I was naturally becoming. Why was this so hard to do?"

Reblogged from hermannhesse

Hermann Hesse (via hermannhesse)

(Source: eyeleech)

"There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time. In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting."

Reblogged from fuckyeahexistentialism

Milan Kundera, Slowness (via thought-emancipation)

(Source: dishabillic)

"You must find your dream…but no dream lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular dream."

Reblogged from hermannhesse

Hermann Hesse (via hermannhesse)

"When you like someone, you like them in spite of their faults. When you love someone, you love them with their faults."

Reblogged from hermannhesse

Hermann Hesse (via hermannhesse)

"All suicides have the responsibility of fighting against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be conquered by life than to fall by one’s own hand."

Reblogged from hermannhesse

HERMANN HESSE, Steppenwolf (via hermannhesse)