“Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them.”
More from Hermann Hesse on Philosophy
“desires are not killed by fulfilling them”
“Not in his speech, not in his thoughts, I see his greatness, only in his actions, in his life.”
“Were not the gods forms created like me and you, mortal, transient?”
“Once a man takes honesty as his ideal, he cannot confine himself to showing the pleasant and reasonable side of his nature.”
“Once a man takes honesty as his ideal, he cannot confine himself to showing to pleasant and reasonable side of his nature.”
“I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.”
“An enlightened man had but one duty - to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led.”
“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.”
“The middle class prefers comfort to pleasure convenience to liberty and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.”
“There is no reality except the one contained within us.”
Others on Philosophy
Ludwig Wittgenstein
22 quotes“The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.”
Christopher Hitchens
22 quotes“How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of...”
Nietzsche
22 quotes“One does not hate as long as one has a low esteem of someone, but only when one esteems him as an equal or a superior.”
Carl Jung
21 quotes“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”
Immanuel Kant
20 quotes“Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”
Heraclitus
19 quotes“All things flow nothing abides.”
H. L. Mencken
17 quotes“We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”
C.S. Lewis
15 quotes“[Consciousness] is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
14 quotes“Consciousness is man's greatest misfortune, still I know that man loves it and will not exchange it for any satisfaction...”
Samuel Beckett
14 quotes“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”
Napoleon
14 quotes“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.”
Joseph Conrad
13 quotes“The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future.”