Matthew > Matthew's Quotes

“I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.”
― Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”
― C.G. Jung

“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.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Withdraw into yourself and look.”
― Plotinus

“Some people are fond of horses, others of wild animals; in my case, I have been possessed since childhood by a prodigious desire to buy and own books.”
― Julian the Apostate

“This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed.”
― DH Lawrence

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”
― Heraclitus

“Once a man takes honesty as his ideal, he cannot confine himself to showing the pleasant and reasonable side of his nature.”
― Hermann Hesse, Crisis

“Mysteries make one dream of unendurable bewitchments, they have the fragrance of something quite, quite unspeakably beautiful.”
― Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

“The interpretation of Dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind”
― Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― C.G. Jung

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

“Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Life is more hellish than hell itself.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories