Top 100 Hesse's Quotes
#1. Hesse's Journey to the East (1951) in the fifties anticipated the occult revival of the late sixties. But who will interpret for us the amazing success of Rosemary's Baby and 2001? I am merely asking the question.
Mircea Eliade
#2. I read Hesse's Steppenwolf thrice. The first time I was enchanted, the second time disappointed, the third time appalled.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki
#3. Are ideals attainable? Do we live to abolish death? No-we live to fear it and then again to love it, and just for death's sake it is that our spark of life glows for an hour now and then so brightly.
Hermann Hesse
#4. It is not Kafka's fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.
Herman Hesse
#5. Psychoanalysis has at bottom no other goal than to create a space within oneself in which God's voice can be heard
Hermann Hesse
#6. In spite of their friendship, they were so far apart, the bowstring was so taut between them: a seeing man and a blind man, they walked side by side ; the blind man's unawareness of his own blindness was a consolation only to himself.
Hermann Hesse
#7. Our god's name is Abraxas and he is God and Satan and he contains both the luminous and the dark world.
Hermann Hesse
#8. It is not my place to judge another person's life. Only for myself, for myself alone, I must decide, I must chose, I must refuse.
Hermann Hesse
#9. Oh, was not all suffering time, were not all forms of tormenting oneself and being afraid time, was not everything hard, everything hostile in the world gone and overcome as soon as one had overcome time, as soon as time would have been put out of existence by one's thoughts?
Hermann Hesse
#10. 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.
Hermann Hesse
#11. 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
#12. One must find the source within one's own Self, one must possess it. Everything else was seeking
a detour, an error.
Hermann Hesse
#13. Obeying is like eating and drinking. There's nothing like it if you've been without it for too long.
Hermann Hesse
#14. 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
#15. In the beginning was the myth . God , in his search for self -expression, invested the souls of Hindus , Greeks , and Germans with poetic shapes and continues to invest each child 's soul with poetry every day.
Hermann Hesse
#16. Every man's story is important, eternal and sacred. That is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous and worthy of every consideration.
Hermann Hesse
#17. To be able to throw one's self away for the sake of a moment, to be able to sacrifice years for a woman's smile - that is happiness.
Hermann Hesse
#18. The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas.
Hermann Hesse
#19. Now Livie's gone west, out of the dust, on her way to California, where the wind takes a rest sometimes. And I'm wondering what kind of friend I am, wanting my feet on that road to another place,instead of Livie's.
Karen Hesse
#20. When things come to an end in a way you didn't expect, in a way you never could have imagined, do they really come to an end? Does it mean you should keep searching, for better answers, for ones that don't keep you up at night? Or does it mean it's time to make peace?
Monica Hesse
#21. 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
#22. I shall begin my story with an experience I had when I was ten and attended our small town's Latin school.
Hermann Hesse
#23. How Heavy the Days ...
How heavy the days are.
There's not a fire that can warm me,
Not a sun to laugh with me,
Everything bare,
Everything cold and merciless,
And even the beloved, clear
Stars look desolately down,
Since I learned in my heart that
Love can die.
Hermann Hesse
#24. Forgive me, father, I am not certain what my own wishes are. I shall always take pleasure in study, how could it be otherwise? But I do not believe that my life will be limited to study. A man's wishes may not always determine his destiny, his mission; perhaps there are other predetermining factors.
Hermann Hesse
#25. But it's a poor fellow who can't take his pleasure without asking other people's permission.
Hermann Hesse
#26. The person who truly wants nothing except his destiny no longer has others of his own kind; he stands completely alone and has only the chill of outer space around him. You know, that's Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane.
Hermann Hesse
#27. See what monkeys we are! Look, such is man! and at once all renown, all intelligence, all the attainments of the spirit, all progress towards the sublime, the great and the enduring in man fell away and became a monkey's trick!
Hermann Hesse
#28. It is treason to sacrifice love of truth, intellectual honesty, loyalty to the laws and methods of the mind, to any other interests, including those of one's country.
Hermann Hesse
#29. 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
#30. The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life's wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.
Herman Hesse
#31. And the river's voice was full of longing, full of smarting woe, full of insatiable desire.
Hermann Hesse
#32. All suicides have the responsibility of fighting against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be conquered by life than to fall by one's own hand.
Hermann Hesse
#33. The father touched Siddhartha's shoulder. 'You will go into the forest,' he said, 'and become a Samana. If you find bliss in the forest, come back and teach it to me. If you find disillusionment, come back, and we shall again offer sacrifices to the gods together. Now go..
Hermann Hesse
#34. I have already given some account of the Steppenwolf's outward appearance. He gave at the very first glance the impression of a significant, an uncommon, and unusually gifted man. His
Hermann Hesse
#35. 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
#36. We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. 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: each the other's opposite and complement.
Hermann Hesse
#37. I don't know much about him. He is a carver in our bishop's city, a days journey from here; he has a great reputation as an artist. Artists usually are no saints, he's probably no saint either, but he certainly is a gifted, high-minded man.
Hermann Hesse
#38. It's unfashionable to admit, but playing music makes us happy and makes us smile.
Chris Hesse
#39. Om is the bow, the arrow is soul, The Brahman is the arrow's target that one should incessantly hit.
Hermann Hesse
#40. It's so good to know that inside us there's a self that knows everything!
Hermann Hesse
#41. You could observe people's folly, you could laugh at them or feel sorry for them, but you had to let them go their own way.
Hermann Hesse
#42. Then you know. You know what it's like to love someone like you love yourself and lose them.
Monica Hesse
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Granted, there is always much that is hidden, and we must not forget that the writing of history - however dryly it is done and however sincere the desire for objectivity - remains literature. History's third dimension is always fiction
Hermann Hesse
#46. The law?" I asked curiously. "What law's that, Leo?"
"The law of service. He who wishes to live must serve, but he who wishes to rule does not live long.
Hermann Hesse
#47. Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak ... surrender to them. Don't ask first whether it's permitted, or would please your teachers or father or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that.
Hermann Hesse
#48. Everyone who has changed the course of human history, every last one was able to do so only because he was ready for his destiny. That's true of Moses and the Buddha, Napoleon and Bismarck. The wave that carries us, the star that guides us - we cannot choose it.
Hermann Hesse
#49. I love to photograph the tools of one's trade: Duncan Grant's paintbrushes, the typewriter of Herman Hesse, or even my own guitar, a 1957 Fender Duo-Sonic.
Patti Smith
#50. The work of one author or artist may stimulate another author or artist to push the edge, to take the risk, to go where the field hasn't gone before. The result -very exciting children's literature and art ... exciting both for the professional and for the intended audience, the children.
Karen Hesse
#51. Words are not good for the secret meaning; everything always becomes a little bit different the moment one speaks it aloud, a bit falsified, a bit foolish - yes, and this too is also very good and pleases me greatly: that one person's treasure and wisdom always sounds like foolishness to others.
Hermann Hesse
#52. You're free this evening, Barbele. You just don't want to come.
Hermann Hesse
#53. Remember, my dear Govinda, the world of appearances is transitory, the style of our clothes and hair is extremely transitory. Our hair and our bodies are themselves transitory.
Hermann Hesse
#54. How foolish it is to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence.
Hermann Hesse
#55. 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?
Hermann Hesse
#56. Mathematics, as far as he was concerned, was a Sphinx charged with deceitful puzzles whose cold malicious gaze transfixed her victims, and he gave the monster a wide berth.
Hermann Hesse
#57. Above all Siddartha learned from the river how to listen, to listen with a still heart, with a waiting, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgments, without opinions.
Hermann Hesse
#59. I play songs that have only the pattern of my self in them and you hum along suporting me. You are the companion to myself. The mirror with my mother'e eyes.
Karen Hesse
#60. Yes, so it was, everything came back, which had not been suffered and solved up to its end, the same pain was suffered over and over again.
Hermann Hesse
#61. Madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom
Hermann Hesse
#62. Now, he had to experience his self.. . . But never, he had really found
this self, because he had wanted to capture it in the net of thought.
Hermann Hesse
#63. Her chatter had set her free from a long week of loneliness, of doing what she was told and saying nothing. She was all cheered up.
Hermann Hesse
#64. The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect or confined at a point somewhere along a gradual pathway toward perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment.
Hermann Hesse
#65. I was out of my bed in one second, trembling with excitement, and I dashed to the door and into the adjoining room, where I could watch the streets below from the windows.
Herman Hesse
#66. But it seems that Abraxas has a much greater significance. We may look upon the name as that of a deity who had the symbolic task of combining the godlike and the devilish." The
Hermann Hesse
#67. Mozart is waiting for me. Pablo is waiting for me.
Hermann Hesse
#68. When trying to remember my share in the glow of the eternal present, in the smile of God, I return to my childhood, too, for that is where the most significant discoveries turn up.
Herman Hesse
#69. It enraged and exhausted me to observe how the common daily life callously demanded its due and devoured the abundance of optimism I had brought with me.
Hermann Hesse
#70. It was lovely, and tempting, to exert power over men and to shine before others, but power also had its perditions and perils.
Hermann Hesse
#71. It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.
Hermann Hesse
#72. When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.
Hermann Hesse
#74. To listen with a still heart, with a waiting, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgement, without opinions.
Hermann Hesse
#75. Faith and doubt go hand in hand, they are complementaries. One who never doubts will never truly believe.
Hermann Hesse
#76. Remember this: one can be a strict logician or grammarian and at the same time full of imagination and music.
Hermann Hesse
#77. The old buzzard told me his life's story. I only remember that it was interesting and unusual; I've forgotten all the details.
Hermann Hesse
#78. That's like this: any truth can only be expressed and put into words when it is one-sided. Everything is one-sided which can be thought with thoughts and said with words, it's all one-sided, all just one half, all lacks completeness, roundness, oneness.
Hermann Hesse
#79. Perhaps, people of our kind can't love. The childlike people can; that's their secret.
Hermann Hesse
#80. If what matters in a person's existence is to accept the inevitable consciously, to taste the good and bad to the full and to make for oneself a more individual, unaccidental and inward
destiny alongside one's external fate, then my life has been neither empty nor worthless.
Hermann Hesse
#81. If a person were to concentrate all his will power on a certain end, then he would achieve it. That's all.
Hermann Hesse
#82. My father and I, we can't soothe each other. I'm too young, he's too old, and we don't know how to talk anymore if we ever did
Karen Hesse
#83. Each of us has to find out for himself what is permitted and what is forbidden.. forbidden for him. It's possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard. And vice versa.
Hermann Hesse
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Can't you see that you had to be a reckless drifter to bring ... people a bit of child's folly and child's laughter wherever you went? To make all sorts of people love you a little and tease you a little and be a little grateful to you?
Hermann Hesse
#87. I turn my back on him as he goes,
and settle myself in the parlor,
and touch Ma's piano.
My fingers leave sighs
in the dust.
Karen Hesse
#88. Muoth was right. On growing old, one becomes more contented than in one's youth, which I will not therefore revile, for in all my dreams I hear my youth like a wonderful song which now sounds more harmonious than it did in reality, and even sweeter
Hermann Hesse
#89. It is remarkable, all that men can swallow. For a good ten minutes I read a newspaper. I allowed the spirit of an irresponsible man who chews and munches another's words in his mouth, and gives them out again undigested, to enter into me through my eyes.
Hermann Hesse
#90. Man's life seems to me like a long, weary night that would be intolerable if there were not occasionally flashes of light, the sudden brightness of which is so comforting and wonderful, that the moments of their appearance cancel out and justify the years of darkness.
Hermann Hesse
#91. It was one of the ferryman's greatest virtues that, like few people, he knew how to listen.
Hermann Hesse
#92. The purifications were nice, but they were just water, and didn't wash away sins; they didn't cure the mental thirst or allay his heart's anxiety.
Hermann Hesse
#93. My heart will still ache sometimes. Maybe more often than not. I think it's possible to be healed without feeling whole.
Monica Hesse
#94. 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
#95. Each man's life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself.
Hermann Hesse
#96. Maybe we can't barter our feelings away, trading good deeds for bad ones and expecting to become whole.
Monica Hesse
#97. I have known it for a long time but I have only just experienced it. Now I know it not only with my intellect, but with my eyes, with my heart, with my stomach.
Hermann Hesse
#98. Naturally I belonged to the bright and correct world, I was my parents' child; but wherever I turned my eyes and ears, the other world was there and I lived in it, too, even though it was often unfamiliar and uncanny to me,
Hermann Hesse
#99. I had considered myself some kind of genius and had considerably underestimated the toils and difficulties encountered along the path to an art.
Hermann Hesse
#100. I live in my dreams - that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference.
Hermann Hesse
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