So you can't dance? Not at all? Not even one step? How can you say that you've taken any trouble to live when you won't even dance?
Interpretation
Dancing symbolizes joy and expression in life, suggesting that living fully involves embracing experiences.
In this quote, Hermann Hesse emphasizes the importance of engaging in life's moments and not shying away from personal expression, such as dancing. He suggests that rejecting joyful activities indicates a lack of appreciation for life itself and encourages individuals to embrace experiences that bring happiness and fulfillment.
In practice
During a motivational speech about embracing life's experiences.
I shall no longer be instructed by the Yoga Veda or the Aharva Veda, or the ascetics, or any other doctrine whatsoever. I shall learn from myself, be a pupil of myself; I shall get to know myself, the mystery of Siddhartha." He looked around as if he were seeing the world for the first time.
That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged β to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony.
I, also, would like to look and smile, sit and walk like that, so free, so worthy, so restrained, so candid, so childlike and mysterious. A man only looks and walks like that when he has conquered his Self. I also will conquer my Self.
You're quite right there," he said. "I have practiced abstinence myself for years, and had my time of fasting, too, but now I find myself once more beneath the sign of Aquarius, a dark and humid constellation.
I call that man awake who, with conscious knowledge and understanding, can perceive the deep unreasoning powers in his soul, his whole innermost strength, desire and weakness, and knows how to reckon with himself.
Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding, and to fulfill their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side.
I turned 54 this year and I find myself feeling like I'm in a bit of a race to get down on paper the way I really feel about life - or the way it has presented to me. And because it has presented to me very beautifully, this is hard. It is technically very hard to show positive manifestations.
Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air. It's too big and mysterious and pervasive to be defined. Alcohol is everywhere in your life, omnipresent, and you're both aware and unaware of it almost all the time, all you know is you'd die without it, and there is no simple reason why this happens, no single moment, no physiological event that pushes a heavy drinker across a concrete line into alcoholism. It's a slow, gradual, insidious, elusive becoming.
By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way.
In order to live the life we desire, and set the intention for greater happiness and more meaningful connections with others, we have to release the hold that our past has on us
Some of your griefs you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you've endured From evils that never arrived.
The part of life which we really live is short.
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