top of page
.png){kind=small}
Exlpore more Integrity quotes
"Living honestly is a prerequisite for a clear conscience."
"People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked. The man who lies to the world, is the world's slave from then on. There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all."
"Dimitri is dead," she said. It was a statement, not a question, but she was looking to me for confirmation. I wondered if I'd given away something, some hint that there was still more to the story. Or maybe she just needed the certainty of those words. And for a moment, I considered telling them that Dimitri was dead. It was what the Academy would tell them, what the guardians would tell them. It would be easier on them...but somehow, I couldn't stand to lie to them-even if it was a comforting lie. Dimitri would have wanted the whole truth, and his family would too. "No," I said, and for a heartbeat, hope sprang up in everyone's faces-at least until I spoke again. "Dimitri's a Strigoi."
"It is a grand mistake to think of being great without goodness and I pronounce it as certain that there was never a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous."
"He hesitated, then lifted his head and sniffed. "Have you been drinking? The question was more curious than accusatory. "No, Bast said. The innkeeper raised an eyebrow. "I've been tasting, Bast said, emphasizing the word. "Tasting comes before drinking."
Explore more quotes by Hermann Hesse
"To deal with history [life] means to abandon one's self to chaos but to retain a belief in the ordination and the meaning. It is a very serious task."
"What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale."
"That is just what life is when it is beautiful and happy - a game! Naturally, one can also do all kinds of other things with it, make a duty of it, or a battleground, or a prison, but that does not make it any prettier."
"Either a man goes and hangs himself, and then he hangs sure enough, and he'll have his reasons for it, or else he goes on living and then he has only living to bother himself with. Simple enough."
"There had been a quarrel, she had been hurt, had wept. Now it was over; now she sat still and waited. Life would go on. As with children. As with animals. If only you did not talk, did not make simple things complicated, did not turn your soul inside out."
"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."
"A thousand times I was ready to regret and take back my rash statement - yet it had been the truth."
"Siddhartha has one single goal-to become empty, to become empty of thirst, desire, dreams, pleasure and sorrow-to let the Self die. No longer to be Self, to experience the peace of an emptied heart, to experience pure thought-that was his goal."
"The "music of decline had sounded, as in that wonderful Chinese fable; like a thrumming bass on the organ its reverberations faded slowly out over decades; its throbbing could be heard in the corruption of the schools, periodicals, and universities, in melancholia and insanity among those artists and critics who could still be taken seriously; it raged as untrammeled and amateurish overproduction in all the arts."
bottom of page