Hermann Hesse Quotes

I want to learn from myself, want to be my student, want to get to know myself, the secret of Siddhartha.

Love is like death. It is fulfillment and an evening after which nothing more may follow.

The river is everywhere at the same time . . . everywhere and the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future.

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

I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.

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.

All higher humor begins with ceasing to take oneself seriously.

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

What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life

I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back.

There is a miracle in every new beginning

Knowledge can communicated but not wisdom.

All interpretation, all psychology, all attempts to make things comprehensible, require the medium of theories, mythologies, and lies.

Who travels far will often see things Far removed from what was believed as Truth.

That life is difficult, I have often bitterly realized.

I can think. I can wait. I can fast.

In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.

How could I fail to be a lone wolf, and an uncouth hermit, as I did not share one of its aims nor understand one of its pleasures?

For me, however, that beloved, glowing little word happiness has become associated with everything I have felt since childhood upon hearing the sound of the word itself.

You've never lived what you are thinking, and that isn't good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.

A thousand times I was ready to regret and take back my rash statement - yet it had been the truth.

I do want more. I am not content with being happy. I was not made for it. It is not my destiny. My destiny is the opposite.

...and the vessel was not full, his intellect was not satisfied, his soul was not at peace, his heart was not still.

You show the world as a complete, unbroken chain, an eternal chain, linked together by cause and effect.

Gratitude is not a virtue I believe in, and to me it seems hypocritical to expect it from a child.

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.

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.

I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me.

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

Every politician in the world is all for revolution, reason, and disarmament-but only in enemy countries, not in his own.

Sentimentality is a basking in feelings that in reality you don't take seriously enough to make the slightest sacrifice to or ever translate into action.

During deep meditation it is possible to dispel time, to see simultaneously all the past, present, and future, and then everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman.

But it's a poor fellow who can't take his pleasure without asking other people's permission.

The voices of all creatures are in the voices of the river.

a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful.

I have always been a great dreamer; in dreams I am more active than in my real life, and these shadows sapped me of health and energy.

One can beg, buy, be presented with and find love in the streets, but it can never be stolen.

A father can pass on his nose and eyes and even his intelligence to his child, but not his soul. In every human being the soul is new

When two cultures collide is the only time when true suffering exists.

One of the aphorisms occurred to me now and I wrote it under the picture: "Fate and temperament are two words for one and the same concept." That was clear to me now.

Fortunately, like most children, I had learned what is most valuable, most indispensable for life before school years began, taught by apple trees, by rain and sun, river and woods.

You will become tired, Siddhartha." "I will become tired." "You will fall asleep, Siddhartha." "I will not fall asleep." "You will die, Siddhartha." "I will die.

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.

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

The mind is international and supra-national ... it ought to serve not war and annihilation, but peace and reconciliation.

To recognize causes is to think, and through thought alone feelings become knowledge and are not lost, but become real and begin to mature.

But peace, too, is a living thing and like all life it must wax and wane, accommodate, withstand trials, and undergo changes.

But your questions, which are unanswerable without exception, all spring from the same erroneous thinking.

Did all this make sense?

The bourgeois today burns as heretics and hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments tomorrow.