Hermann Hesse Quotes

How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.

I was struck by an awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken back once it escapes into the open air of consciousness; it seemed to me that this was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die.

Soul's escaping through this hole that is gaping

Death holds no horrors. It is simply the ultimate horror of life.

Life is a long drawn out lie, with a sniffling sigh at the end of it.

What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living.

Well the deputy walks on hard nails and the preacher rides a mount, But nothing really matters much it's doom alone that counts.

People? People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought experiment. At the campfire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling and how they're going down. We've been there. Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a fulltime job looking the other way.

You have to be very deep to be dead, he thought, and I'm not. He began to have some concept of forever, and his mind shivered as his body had when he had wakened in the cold nights and thrust his hands between his thighs to keep warm. It will be a long night, he thought.

Marla's philosophy of life, she told me, is that she can die at any moment. The tragedy of her life is that she doesn't.

There is darkness without and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, nor vastness anywhere; only triviality for a moment and then nothing.

it ultimately doesn't matter which disease gnaws away at the body - it looks the same. The flesh surrenders, grows exhausted, and the eyes ask why.

Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.

Death is always less painful and easier than life! You speak true. And yet we do not, day to day, choose death. Because ultimately, death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice. Death is what you get when there are no choices left to make.

She was a ghost in a strange house that overnight had become immense and solitary and through which she wandered without purpose, asking herself in anguish which one of them was deader: the man who had died or the woman he had left behind.

Give me a paper and pen, so I can write about my life of sin. A couple of bottles of gin, in case I don't get in.

...we ask: Why suicide? We search for reasons, causes, and so on.... We follow the course of the life he has now so suddenly terminated as far back as we can. For days we are preoccupied with the question: Why suicide? We recollect details. And yet we must say that everything in the suicide's life- for now we know that all his life he was a suicide, led a suicide's existence- is part of the cause, the reason, for his suicide.

I have to apologize to you that I am still among the living. There will be a remedy for this, however.

Amid the sufferings of life on earth, suicide is God's best gift to man.

When man has come to the Turnstiles of Night, all the creeds in the world seem to him wonderfully alike and colorless.

We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not, or die of despair...death will sweep through all the worlds; it will be the triumph of despair, forever. The universes will all become nothing more than interlocking machines, blind and empty of thought, feeling, life...

I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.

Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day that we die.

My joy is death- Death, at whose name I oft have been afeard, Because I wish'd this world's eternity.

After a few decades, everyone you know will be dead. Problem solved.