It is good to taste for yourself everything you need to know. That worldly pleasures and wealth are not good things, I learned even as a child. I knew it for a long time, but only now have I experienced it.
Interpretation
Personal experience is essential for true understanding, especially about worldly pleasures and wealth.
In this quote, Hermann Hesse reflects on the importance of personal experience in gaining knowledge. While he acknowledges having learned about the futility of worldly pleasures and wealth as a child, it took him a longer time to fully comprehend and internalize these lessons through lived experiences, suggesting that true wisdom often comes from personal insights rather than just intellectual understanding.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal growth at a seminar.
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 — 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.
Remember that unjust critisism is often a disquised compliment.
If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.
As long as you keep one foot in the real world while the other foot's in a fairy tale, that fairy tale is going to seem kind of attainable.
The scar will remain, but it is better for a man to lose both arms than his soul; and these hard years, instead of being lost, may be made the most precious of your lives, if they teach you to rule yourselves.
Improve your spare moments and they will become the brightest gems in your life.
It's not enough to be nice in life. You've got to have nerve.
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