100 Quotes by Hermann Hesse
Hermann Hesse, a German-Swiss novelist, intricately wove spiritual exploration and existential inquiry into his literary works, making him a literary figure of immense significance. His novels, including "Siddhartha," "Steppenwolf," and "The Glass Bead Game," tackled the search for meaning, individuality, and the conflicts between societal norms and personal growth. Hesse's prose often delved into the realms of Eastern philosophy, mysticism, and self-discovery, reflecting his own spiritual journey. His ability to capture the struggles of individuals yearning for authenticity and enlightenment resonated with readers across cultures and generations. Hesse's legacy lies in his profound ability to distill complex philosophical ideas into relatable narratives, inviting readers to embark on introspective journeys of their own.
Hermann Hesse Quotes
To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do.
Within you there is a stillness and sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself
I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.
If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.
Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.
When you like someone, you like them in spite of their faults. When you love someone, you love them with their faults.
There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.
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. The God's name is Abraxas.
Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.
I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference.
Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.
You have to try the impossible to achieve the possible
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.
We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots and executions. We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, suffering and shame.
Every experience has its element of magic.
Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?" That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.
I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books. I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams -- like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.
Love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is only your aversion to it that hurts, nothing else.
Happiness is a how; not a what. A talent, not an object.
You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them!
I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.
God does not send us despair in order to kill us; he sends it in order to awaken us to new life.
People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.
Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again.
There is no reality except the one contained within us.
If I know what love is, it is because of you.
A tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me!... Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
The truth is lived, not taught.
A home isn't just a roof over our heads. A home is a place where we feel loved and where we love others. It's a place we belong. Love is what makes a home, not the contents inside the house or the number on the door. It's the people waiting for us across the threshold, the people who will take us in their arms after a ad day and kiss us good night and good morning everyday for the rest of our lives.
Happiness is love, nothing else. A man who is capable of love is happy.
When the suffering becomes acute enough, one goes forward.
I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.
Gentleness is stronger than severity, water is stronger than rock, love is stronger than force.
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.
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.
You must find your dream, then the way becomes easy.
You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves.
Solitude is independence.
As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.
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!
A house without books is a poor house, even if beautiful rugs are covering its floors and precious wallpapers and pictures cover its walls
And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life.
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try again and again to console my heart and pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell.
Slowly blossomed, slowly ripened in Siddhartha the realisation, the knowledge, what wisdom actually was, what the goal of his long search was. It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, an ability, a secret art, to think every moment, while living his life, the thought of oneness, to be able to feel and inhale the oneness.
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.
madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom
Life is waiting everywhere, the future is flowering everywhere, but we only see a small part of it and step on much of it with our feet
We have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.
The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.
Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism.
Love must neither beg nor demand. Love must be strong enough to find certainty within itself. It then cease to be moved and becomes the mover.
Not in his speech, not in his thoughts, I see his greatness, only in his actions, in his life.
The river has taught me to listen; you will learn from it, too. The river knows everything; one can learn everything from it. You have already learned from the river that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek the depths.
Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them.
For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche.
Loneliness is the way by which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself.
Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself....His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness.
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, and everything made sense.
You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.
For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.
The true profession of a man is to find his way to himself.
What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world.
I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.
This day will never come again and anyone who fails to eat and drink and taste and smell it will never have it offered to him again in all eternity. The sun will never shine as it does today...But you must play your part and sing a song, one of your best.
Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.
When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.
One who never doubts will never truly believe.
Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others.
Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists of putting too high a value on time. In eternity there is no time. Eternity is a moment, just long enough for a joke
Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.
Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.
We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.
Each man's life represents a road toward himself.
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.
A man who is ill-adjusted to the world is always on the verge of finding himself. One who is adjusted to the world never finds himself, but gets to be a cabinet minister.
The greatest threat to our world and its peace comes from those who want war, who prepare for it, and who, by holding out vague promises of future peace or by instilling fear of foreign aggression, try to make us accomplices to their plans.
The best weapons against the infamies of life are courage, willfulness and patience. Courage strengthens, willfulness is fun and patience provides tranquility.
If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.
We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.
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.
The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.
When someone is seeking, it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. You, O worthy one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose.
One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.
What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.
Most people are like a falling leaf that drifts and turns in the air, flutters, and falls to the ground. But a few others are like stars which travel one defined path: no wind reaches them, they have within themselves their guide and path.
Beauty does not bring happiness to the one who possesses it, but to the one who loves and admires it.
I do not wish to go out into the world with an insurance policy in my pocket guaranteeing my return in the event of a disappointment, like some cautious traveller who would be content with a brief glimpse of the world. On the contrary, I desire that there should be hazards, difficulties and dangers to face; I am hungry for reality, for tasks and deeds, and also for privation and suffering.
We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, affliction, or infamy. We kill when, because it is easier, we countenance, or pretend to approve of atrophied social, political, educational, and religious institutions, instead of resolutely combating them.
Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
Age is a state of mind. Youth and age exist only among the ordinary people. All the more talented and exceptional of us; are sometimes old, just as we are sometimes happy, and sometimes sad.
We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.
Art is the contemplation of the world in a state of grace.
To achieve the possible, we must attempt the impossible again and again.
Theory is knowledge that doesn't work. Practice is when everything works and you don't know why.
Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long.
The world was so beautiful when regarded like this, without searching, so simply, in such a childlike way. Moons and stas were beautiful, beautiful were bank and stream, forest and rocks, goat and gold-bug, flower and butterfly. So lovely, so delightful to go through the world this way, so like a child, awake, open to what is near, without distrust.
Only the ideas that we really live have any value.
You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.
The truth has a million faces, but there is only one truth.
The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.
Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.
Your soul is the whole world.
Every phenomenon on earth is symbolic, and each symbol is an open gate through which the soul, if it is ready, can enter into the inner part of the world, where you and I and day and night are all one.
There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.
My real self wanders elsewhere, far away, wanders on and on invisibly and has nothing to do with my life.
She stood before him and surrendered herself to him and sky, forest, and brook all came toward him in new and resplendent colors, belonged to him, and spoke to him in his own language. And instead of merely winning a woman he embraced the entire world and every star in heaven glowed within him and sparkled with joy in his soul. He had loved and had found himself. But most people love to lose themselves.
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.
Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.
Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.
The highest art... sets down its creations and trusts in their magic, without fear of not being understood.
Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.
What we can and should change is ourselves: our impatience, our egoism (including intellectual egoism), our sense of injury, our lack of love and forbearance. I regard every other attempt to change the world, even if it springs from the best intentions, as futile.
He had loved and he had found himself. Most people love to lose themselves.
I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am responsible for what I do with the life I've got.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
Chaos demands to be recognized and experienced before letting itself be converted into a new order.
No permanence is ours, we are a wave that flows to fit whatever form it finds.
The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people — eternal life.
Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence
All life was a breath exhaled by God. All dying was a breath inhaled by God.
You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing.
Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else.
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.
There is a miracle in every new beginning
All higher humor begins with ceasing to take oneself seriously.
For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers.
Opinions mean nothing; they may be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can embrace or reject them.
The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been given back to me today by this friend of mine who taught me dancing.
Om is the bow, the arrow is soul.
It taught him how to listen -- how to listen with a quiet heart and a waiting soul, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgment, without opinion.
My goal is this: always to put myself in the place in which I am best able to serve, wherever my gifts and qualities find the best soil to grow, the widest field of action. There is no other goal.
Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader.
A magic dwells in each beginning, protecting us, telling us how to live.
You show the world as a complete, unbroken chain, an eternal chain, linked together by cause and effect.
I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me.
A thousand times I was ready to regret and take back my rash statement - yet it had been the truth.
When two cultures collide is the only time when true suffering exists.
Everyone can reach his goal, if he can think, wait and fast.
All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?
Love of God is not always the same as love of good.
Making music together is the best way for two people to become friends.
The tree does not die, it waits.
In the beginning was the myth.
The cup was emptied and would never be filled again.
― Hermann Hesse Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
