Hermann Hesse famous quotes

Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Love #Life #Moving On

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.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Inspirational #Faith #Uplifting

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.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Time #Ocean #Past

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

#Stars #Book #Teaching

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.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Patience #Revenge #People

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.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Spiritual #Hate #Hatred

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.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Inspirational #Life #Wisdom

The truth is lived, not taught....
-- Hermann Hesse

#Truth #Taught #Truth Is

. . . gentleness is stronger than severity, water is stronger than rock, love is stronger than force.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Love Is #Rocks #Water

When someone seeks," said Siddhartha, "then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Mean #Eye #Thinking

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.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Lonely #Men #Tree

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.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Rivers #Depth #Taught

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.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Disappointment #Suffering #Vex

Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Taken #Laughing #Steppenwolf

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.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Passion #Home #Creative

They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Voice #Water #Siddhartha

A magic dwells in each beginning, protecting us, telling us how to live...
-- Hermann Hesse

#Magic

I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I'm beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn't pleasant, it's not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Dream #Sweet #Stars

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.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Life #Law #Tree

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Book #Writing #Humanity

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

#Motivational #Respect #Honor

Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Stars #Space #Years

The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes almost arrogant. You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine's Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world's puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Conceited #Thinking #Agony

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.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Goal #Quality #Able

Words can not express the joy of new life.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Baby #Joy #New Life

Happiness is a how; not a what. A talent, not an object.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Happiness #You Make Me Happy #Inner Peace

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

#Opposites #Mind #Lines

So she thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it. She taught him that after a celebration of love the lovers should not part without admiring each other, without being conquered or having conquered, so that neither is bleak or glutted or has the bad feeling of being used or misused.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Inspirational #Sex #Giving

One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Time #Home #House

And some day there will be nothing left of everything that has twisted my life and grieved it and filled me so often with such anguish. Some day, with the last exhaustion, peace will come and the motherly earth will gather me back home. It won't be the end of things, only a way of being born again, a bathing and a slumbering where the old and the withered sink down, where the young and new begin to breathe. Then, with other thoughts, I will walk along streets like these, and listen to streams, and overhear what the sky says in the evening, over and over and over.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Home #Sky #Earth

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

#Yoga #Buddhism #Circles

No permanence is ours, we are a wave that flows to fit whatever form it finds.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Flow #Fit #Wave

Within you there is a stillness and sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself
-- Hermann Hesse

#Positive #Being Yourself #Time

Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Communication #Different #Littles

Most men will not swim before they are able to.” Is that not witty? Naturally, they won't swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they wont think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Witty #Men #Thinking

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.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Class #Optimism #Contentment

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

#Dance #Taken #Steps

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

#Life #Hate #Thinking

I shall no longer be instructed by the Yoga Veda or the Aharva Veda, or the ascetics, or any other doctrine whatsoever. I shall learn from myself, be a pupil of myself; I shall get to know myself, the mystery of Siddhartha." He looked around as if he were seeing the world for the first time.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Wisdom #Yoga #Siddhartha

Passion is always a mystery and unaccountable, and unfortunately there is no doubt that life does not spare its purest children; often it is just the most deserving people who cannot help loving those that destroy them.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Breakup #Children #Passion

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

#Dream #Forever #Lasts

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
-- Hermann Hesse

#Long #Moments #Enough

The reason why I do not know anything about myself, the reason why Siddhartha has remained alien and unknown to myself is due to one thing, to one single thing--I was afraid of myself, I was fleeing from myself. I was seeking Atman, I was seeking Brahman, I was determined to dismember myself and tear away its layers of husk in order to find in its unknown innermost recess the kernel at the heart of those layers, the Atman, life, the divine principle, the ultimate. But in so doing, I was losing myself.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Heart #Order #Siddhartha

You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Reality #Law #Yesterday

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.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Voice #Goal #Evil

Loneliness is the way by which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Wise #Loneliness #Destiny

Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Responsibility #Thinking #Leader

Whither will my path yet lead me? This path is stupid, it goes in spirals, perhaps in circles, but whichever way it goes, I will follow it.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Travel #Stupid #Journey

I am much inclined to live from my rucksack, and let my trousers fray as they like.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Travel #Fray

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.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Home #Tree #Bears

I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Men #World #Today

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge - that is everywhere.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Believe #Essence #I Believe

I was given the freedom to discover my own inclination and talents, to fashion my inmost pleasures and sorrows myself and to regard the future not as an alien higher power but as the hope and product of my own strength.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Fashion #Sorrow #Aliens

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Faith #Mean #Order

Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can - that is their secret.
-- Hermann Hesse

#People #Secret Love #Ordinary

You have to try the impossible to achieve the possible
-- Hermann Hesse

#Trying #Impossible #Achieve

Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Long #Moments #Eternity

The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Fire #Liberty #Temperature

That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged — to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Dream #Duration #Mysterious

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.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Would Be #Literature #Too Much

When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Insanity #Insane #Method

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

#Humility #Men #Judging

Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Maturity #Doe #Youth

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

#Time #Passionate #Faces

He has robbed me, yet he has given me something of greater value . . . he has given to me myself.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Given #Values

What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you're searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don't find the time for finding?
-- Hermann Hesse

#Too Much #Should #Findings

Good that you ask -- you should always ask, always have doubts.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Doubt #Should

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.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Inspirational #Encouraging #Song

I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?
-- Hermann Hesse

#Self #Difficult #Accord

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

#Thinking #Ideas #Values

Look: We hate nothing that exists, not even death, suffering and dying, does not horrify our souls, as long as we learn more deeply to love.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Hate #Long #Soul

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

#Writing #Blue #Black

Your soul is the whole world.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Soul #World #Your Soul

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

#Life #Years #Long

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.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Book #Boys #Ideas

Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goals, if he is able to think, if he is able to wait, if he is able to fast.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Thinking #Goal #Waiting

You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Coward #Willing

Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Life #Believe #Endure

You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Harmony

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.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Dancing #Sacred #Today

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.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Dream #Sweet #Stars

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.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Success #Men #World

I felt knowledge and the unity of the world circulate in me like my own blood.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Blood #Diversity #Unity

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

#Wisdom #Heart #Eye

How beautiful the world was when one looked at it, without searching... just looked, simply and innocently.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Beautiful #World

Only within yourself exists the other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Change #Reality #Long

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.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Love #Stars #Winning

Each man's life represents a road toward himself.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Journey #Men

The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Book #Ideas #Taught

People know, or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the world of mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer's slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Running #Thinking #People

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

#Perfection #Grace #Path

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

#Inspirational #Dream #Differences

A mere nothing suffices — and the lightning strikes.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Lightning #Strikes

Thus Gotama [Buddha] walked toward the town to gather alms, and the two samanas recognized him solely by the perfection of his repose, by the calmness of his figure, in which there was no trace of seeking, desiring, imitating, or striving, only light and peace
-- Hermann Hesse

#Light #Two #Perfection

Making music together is the best way for two people to become friends.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Two #People #Together

The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life's wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Beautiful #Philosophy #Gita

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

#Teacher #Truth #Father

Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Inspirational #Children #Writing

If a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Intelligent #Men #Fasting

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.
-- Hermann Hesse

#Dream #Sweet #Hurt