Top 100 Hermann Hesse Quotes
#1. Remember this: one can be a strict logician or grammarian and at the same time full of imagination and music.
Hermann Hesse
#2. Mozart is waiting for me. Pablo is waiting for me.
Hermann Hesse
#3. You're free this evening, Barbele. You just don't want to come.
Hermann Hesse
#4. Our days are precious but we gladly see them going
If in their place we find a thing more precious growing:
A rare, exotic plant, our gardener's heart delighting;
A child whom we are teaching, a booklet we are writing.
Hermann Hesse
#5. Love must not entreat,' she added, 'or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract.
Hermann Hesse
#6. In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified.
Hermann Hesse
#7. Each of us is merely one human being, merely an experiment, a way station. But each of us should be on the way toward perfection, should be striving to reach the center, not the periphery.
Hermann Hesse
#8. One can acquire money, fame and distinction, but one cannot create happiness or unhappiness, not for oneself or for others. One can only accept what comes, although one can, to be sure, accept it in entirely different ways.
Hermann Hesse
#9. He has robbed me, yet he has given me something of greater value ... he has given to me myself.
Hermann Hesse
#10. ..the face struck me at that moment as neither masculine nor childlike, neither old nor young, but somehow a thousand years old, somehow timeless, bearing the scars of an entirely different history than we knew.
Hermann Hesse
#11. And as far as talent is concerned, there will be such an excess that our artists will become their own audiences, and audiences made up of ordinary people will no longer exist.
Hermann Hesse
#12. Seeking nothing, emulating nothing, breathing gently, he moved in an atmosphere of imperishable calm, impresihable light, inviolable peace.
Hermann Hesse
#13. Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
Hermann Hesse
#14. Was it not his Self, his small, fearful and proud Self, with which he had wrestled for so many years, but which had always conquered him again, which appeared each time again and again, which robbed him of happiness and filled him with fear?
Hermann Hesse
#15. You must find your dream ... but no dream lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular dream.
Hermann Hesse
#16. And so Gotama wandered into the town to obtain alms, and the two Samanas recognized him only by his complete peacefulness of demeanor, by the stillness of his form, in which there was no seeking, no will, no counterfeit, no effort - only light and peace.
Hermann Hesse
#17. The only reality is the one we have inside us. What makes most people's lives so artificial and unworthy is that they falsely regard outside images as reality and they never allow their own inner world to speak.
Hermann Hesse
#18. Slowly the disease of the soul, which rich people have, grabbed hold of him.
Hermann Hesse
#19. For awakened human beings, there was no obligation - none, none, none at all - except this: to search for yourself, become sure of yourself, feel your way forward along your own path, wherever it led.
Hermann Hesse
#20. And if time is not real, then the gap which seems to be between the world and the eternity, between suffering and blissfulness, between evil and good, is also a deception." "How
Hermann Hesse
#21. But stronger than his knowledge was his love for the boy, his devotion, his fear of losing him. Had he ever lost his heart to anybody so completely, so painfully, so hopelessly and yet so happily?
Hermann Hesse
#22. Painting is marvelous; it makes you happier and more patient. Afterwards you do not have black fingers as with writing, but blue and red ones.
Hermann Hesse
#23. We were glad to have in our midst a sprinkling of fools, who, although only comparatively foolish, provided a touch of colour and some occasion for laughter and mockery.
Hermann Hesse
#24. But of all the water's secrets, he saw today only a single one-one that struck his soul. He saw that this water flowed and flowed, it was constantly flowing, and yet it was always there; it was always eternally the same and yet new at every moment! Oh, to be able to grasp this, to understand this!
Hermann Hesse
#25. All the girls I had ever loved were mine. Each gave me what she alone had to give and to each I gave what she alone knew how to take.
Hermann Hesse
#26. Gentleness is stronger than severity, water is stronger than rock, love is stronger than force.
Hermann Hesse
#27. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is.
Hermann Hesse
#28. In any case, the most lively young people become the best old people, not those who pretend to be as wise as grandfathers while they are still at school.
Hermann Hesse
#29. Every true reader could, even if not one new book were published, spend decades and centuries studying on, fighting on, continuing to rejoice in the treasure of those already at hand.
Hermann Hesse
#30. Among mathematicians, even in those days, the reputation of being a good Glass Bead Game player meant a great deal; it was equivalent to being a very good mathematician.
Hermann Hesse
#31. Siddhartha considered his circumstances. Thinking did not come easily to him. He didn't really feel like it, but he forced himself.
Hermann Hesse
#32. Here, too, I found neither home nor company, nothing but a seat from which to view a stage where strange people played strange parts.
Hermann Hesse
#33. With men one could have clever, uplifting conversations, and men understood the work of an artist; but everything else-idle talk, tenderness, playfulness, love, contentment unmarred by thought-did not flourish among men; for that there had to be women and new places and constantly new impressions.
Hermann Hesse
#34. Kamaswami entered, a swiftly, smoothly moving man with very gray hair, with very intelligent, cautious eyes, with a greedy mouth. Politely, the host and the guest greeted one another.
Hermann Hesse
#35. Only the ideas that we really live have any value.
Hermann Hesse
#36. The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire
Hermann Hesse
#37. Dreams and restless thoughts came flowing to him from the river, from the twinkling stars at night, from the sun's melting rays. Dreams and a restlessness of the soul came to him.
Hermann Hesse
#38. The dream of death is only the dark smoke
Under which the fires of life are burning.
Hermann Hesse
#39. For the air of lonely men surrounded him now, a still atmosphere in which the world around him slipped away, leaving him incapable of relationship, an atmosphere against which neither will nor longing availed. This was one of the significant earmarks of his life.
Hermann Hesse
#40. Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.
Hermann Hesse
#41. There is good and reason in us ... with whom fortune plays, and we can be stronger than ... fate, if only for a few hours. ... we can draw closer to one another in times of need, understand and love one another, and live to comfort each other.
Hermann Hesse
#42. Within you, there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at anytime and be yourself.
Hermann Hesse
#43. For our goal was not only the East, or rather the East was not only a country and something geographical, but it was the home and youth of the soul, it was everywhere and nowhere, it was the union of all times.
Hermann Hesse
#44. Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One's born and at once one is guilty.
Hermann Hesse
#45. He let himself be led into the night, into the forest, into the blind secret wordless, thoughtless country.
Hermann Hesse
#46. You learned people and artists have, no doubt, all sorts of superior things in your heads; but you're human beings like the rest of us, and we, too, have our dreams and fancies.
Hermann Hesse
#47. He tried to think of death as he had done now and then, but that tired him and he dozed off. When he awoke an hour later, he felt fresh and calm as though he had slept for days.
Hermann Hesse
#48. There's no reality except the one contained within us. That's why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.
Hermann Hesse
#49. We marked men were not at all worried about the shape the future would take.
Hermann Hesse
#50. The freedom to ... regard the future as the hope and product of my own strength and not as something fashioned by some strange power from above.
Hermann Hesse
#52. At the first kiss I felt something melt inside me that hurt in an exquisite way. All my longings, all my dreams and sweet anguish, All the secrets that slept deep within me came awake, Everything was transformed and enchanted, everything made sense.
Hermann Hesse
#53. A person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful.
Hermann Hesse
#54. How beautiful the world was when one looked at it, without searching ... just looked, simply and innocently.
Hermann Hesse
#55. 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.
Hermann Hesse
#56. Perhaps he was handsome, perhaps I liked him, perhaps I also found him repulsive, I could not be sure of that either.
Hermann Hesse
#57. Disclosing his wound to his listener was the same as bathing it in the river, until it became cool and one with the river.
Hermann Hesse
#58. But things are not so simple in life as in our thoughts, nor so rough and ready as in our poor idiotic language; and Harry lies about himself twice over when he employs this niggardly wolf-theory.
Hermann Hesse
#59. It would be better for our country and the world in general, if at least the few people who were capable of thought stood for reason and the love of peace instead of heading wildly with blind obsession for new war.
Hermann Hesse
#60. Eternally revolving wheel of avidity and suffering;
Hermann Hesse
#61. Alas, Siddhartha, I see you suffering, but you're suffering a pain at which one would like to laugh, at which you'll soon laugh for yourself.
Hermann Hesse
#62. It was this very thing, it seemed to him now, which had been his sickness before: that he was not able to love anybody or anything. Siddhartha
Hermann Hesse
#63. It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone.
Hermann Hesse
#65. Were not the gods forms created like me and you, mortal, transient?
Hermann Hesse
#66. That's the way it is when you love. It makes you suffer, and I have suffered much in the years since. But it matters little that you suffer, so long as you feel alive with a sense of the close bond that connects all living things, so long as love does not die!
Hermann Hesse
#67. If a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the smartest thing he can do.
Hermann Hesse
#69. Because I loved them both and wanted to make them my own, they became to me a kind of dream figure, which looks like both of them and is neither. That figure belongs to me, but it no longer has life.
Hermann Hesse
#70. Like animals we call to each other, was the thought that came to him as he remembered the hour of love in the afternoon.
Hermann Hesse
#71. The world was beautiful when looked at in this way - without any seeking, so simple, so childlike.
Hermann Hesse
#72. The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment, every sin already carries grace in it.
Hermann Hesse
#73. They stayed for rapt moments in the crystal sphere of this soul, as if in a realm of invisible radiation, listening to unearthly music, and then returned to their daily lives with hearts cleansed and strengthened, as if descending from a high mountain peak.
Hermann Hesse
#74. I felt and saw the night outside deep within me. Wind and wetness, autumn, bitter smell of foliage, scattered leaves of the elm tree.
Hermann Hesse
#75. . . . nobody will obtain salvation by means of teachings!
Hermann Hesse
#76. Once a man takes honesty as his ideal, he cannot confine himself to showing to pleasant and reasonable side of his nature.
Hermann Hesse
#77. There was only greed for living and dread, and out of dread, out of stupid childish dread of the cold, of loneliness, of death, two people fled to one another, kissed, embraced, rubbed cheek to cheek, put leg to leg, cast new human beings into the world. That was how it was.
Hermann Hesse
#78. All the women of this fevered night, all that I had danced with, all whom I had kindled or who have kindled me, all whom I had courted, all who had clung to me with longing, all whom I had followed with enraptured eyes were melted together and had become one, the one whom I held in my arms.
Hermann Hesse
#79. Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.
Hermann Hesse
#80. Young people have many pleasures and many sorrows, because they have only themselves to think of.
Hermann Hesse
#81. These impulses always came from the "other world," they were always accompanied by anxiety, compulsion, and a troubled conscience, they were always revolutionary, endangering the peace in which I would gladly have gone on living. The
Hermann Hesse
#82. The realms of day and night. Two different worlds coming from two opposite poles mingled during this time.
Hermann Hesse
#83. He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships become newly born. Each one was mortal, a passionate, painful example of all that is transitory. Yet none of them died, they only changed, were always reborn, continually had a new face: only time stood between one face and another.
Hermann Hesse
#84. He had too much to think about. In the course of his long, useless marches he had sunk deeper and deeper into the tangle of his botched life as into a clump of brambles, and still he had found no meaning or consolation.
Hermann Hesse
#85. When two cultures collide is the only time when true suffering exists
Hermann Hesse
#86. And who over the ruins of his life pursued its fleeting, fluttering significance, while he suffered its seeming meaninglessness and lived its seeming madness, and who hoped in secret at the last turn of the labyrinth of Chaos for revelation and God's presence ...
Hermann Hesse
#87. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
Hermann Hesse
#88. Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.
Hermann Hesse
#89. The world was beautiful when one just looked at it without
Hermann Hesse
#90. You've never lived what you are thinking, and that isn't good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.
Hermann Hesse
#91. A person or an act is never entirely Sansara or entirely Nirvana, a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful. It does really seem like this, because we are subject to deception, as if time was something real. Time is not real.
Hermann Hesse
#93. 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.
Hermann Hesse
#95. His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands and thousands.
Hermann Hesse
#96. When you like someone, you like them in spite of their faults. When you love someone, you love them with their faults.
Hermann Hesse
#97. You broke through the humor of my little theater and tried to make a mess of it, stabbing with knives and spattering our pretty picture-world with the mud of reality.
Hermann Hesse
#98. I have always been a great dreamer. In dreams I have always been more active than in my real life, and these shadows sapped me of my health and energy.
Hermann Hesse
#99. The unhappiness that I need and long for is of the kind that will let me suffer with eagerness and die with lust ... That is the unhappiness or happiness I am waiting for ...
Hermann Hesse
#100. All the books of the world full of thoughts and poems are nothing in comparison to a minute of sobbing, when feeling surges in waves, the soul feels itself profoundly and finds itself. Tears are the melting ice of snow. All angels are close to the crying person.
Hermann Hesse
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