Top 500 Hermann Hesse Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “During the dark hours I felt my sick heart expand and beat more furiously, and I no longer made any distinction between pleasure and pain, but one was similar to the other; both hurt and both were precious. Whether my inner life went well or badly, my discovered strength stood peacefully outside looking on and knew that light and dark were closely related and that sorrow and peace were rhythm, part and spirit of the same great music.”

— Hermann Hesse

452. “There had been a quarrel, she had been hurt, had wept. Now it was over; now she sat still and waited. Life would go on. As with children. As with animals. If only you did not talk, did not make simple things complicated, did not turn your soul inside out.”

— Hermann Hesse

453. “But living alone forever and ever, among the quietly sleeping tree trunks, with animals that ran away, with whom one could not speak – that would be unbearably sad.”

— Hermann Hesse

454. “I call a man awake who knows in his conscious reason his innermost unreasonable forces, drives, and weaknesses and knows how to deal with them.”

— Hermann Hesse

455. “It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.”

— Hermann Hesse

456. “For it cannot be denied that all over the world and in all ages there are beings who are perceived to be extraordinary, charming, and appealing, and whom many honor as benevolent spirits, because they make one think of a more beautiful, a freer, a more winged life than the one we lead.”

— Hermann Hesse

457. “Notre frere a ete conduit par son epreuve au desespoir, et les desespoir est la resultat de toute tentative serieuse pour comprendre et justifier la vie humaine. le desespoir est le resultat de tout effort serieux pour mettre sa vie en harmonie avec la vertu, avec la justice, avec la raison, tout en repondant a ses exigences. les enfants vivent en deca de ce desespoir, les adultes au-dela.”

— Hermann Hesse

458. “There was nothing left for him, except to annihilate himself, except to smash the failure into which he had shaped his life, to throw it away, before the feet of mockingly laughing gods.”

— Hermann Hesse

459. “Perhaps he was handsome, perhaps I liked him, perhaps I also found him repulsive, I could not be sure of that either.”

— Hermann Hesse

460. “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

461. “Whenever he is hungry and opens his bag, there are only pearls inside.”

— Hermann Hesse

462. “Every day you are apt to see someone whom you thought you knew through and through do something that proves how little you really know people or can be certain about anything.”

— Hermann Hesse

463. “Each one carries with him to the end traces of his birth, the slime and eggshells of a primordial world.”

— Hermann Hesse

464. “What is called history at school, and all we learn by heart there about heroes and geniuses and great deeds and fine emotions, is all nothing but a swindle invented by the schoolmasters for educational reasons to keep children occupied for a given number of years. It has always been so and always will be. Time and the world, money and power belong to the small people and the shallow people. To the rest, to the real men belongs nothing. Nothing but death.”

— Hermann Hesse

465. “Is not every life, every work fine?”

— Hermann Hesse

466. “Deeply, he felt the love for the run-away in his heart, like a wound, and he felt at the same time that this wound had not been given to him in order to turn the knife in it, that it had to become a blossom and had to shine.”

— Hermann Hesse

467. “The world was beautiful, the world was particolored, strange and quizzical... Meaning and essence were not somewhere behind things, they were inside things, in everything.”

— Hermann Hesse

468. “I realised that all this talk was of no value and at its best only led to clever phrases.”

— Hermann Hesse

469. “Knowledge can be expressed, but not wisdom. One can discover it, one can live it, one can be borne along by it, one can do miracles with it, but one cannot express it and teach it.”

— Hermann Hesse

470. “No one liked him, no one was on intimate terms with him... he was a good person but took no particular trouble to please anyone.”

— Hermann Hesse

471. “The “music of decline” had sounded, as in that wonderful Chinese fable; like a thrumming bass on the organ its reverberations faded slowly out over decades; its throbbing could be heard in the corruption of the schools, periodicals, and universities, in melancholia and insanity among those artists and critics who could still be taken seriously; it raged as untrammeled and amateurish overproduction in all the arts.”

— Hermann Hesse

472. “Now, instead of being just attracted, I was really in love, and it seemed that a thin, grey veil had fallen from my eyes and that the world lay before me in its original divine light as it does to children, and as it appears to us in our dreams of Paradise.”

— Hermann Hesse

473. “If a person were to concentrate all his will power on a certain end, then he would achieve it. That’s all.”

— Hermann Hesse

474. “Haller belongs to those who have been caught between two ages, who are outside of all security and simple acquiescence. He belongs to those whose fate it is to live the whole riddle of human destiny heightened to the pitch of a personal torture, a personal hell.”

— Hermann Hesse

475. “Let every reader do as his conscience bids him.”

— Hermann Hesse

476. “Let the little way to death be as it might, the kernel of this life of mine was noble. It had purpose and character and turned not on trifles, but on the stars.”

— Hermann Hesse

477. “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

478. “Quite a number of people are able to feel the beauty of the world profoundly and vastly, and to carry high, noble images in their souls, but they are unable to exteriorize these images, to create them for the enjoyment of others, to communicate them.”

— Hermann Hesse

479. “Siempre he tenido sed de conocimientos, siempre he estado lleno de interrogaciones.”

— Hermann Hesse

480. “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.”

— Hermann Hesse

481. “Too much thinking was still not good for me.”

— Hermann Hesse

482. “There was once a man, Harry, called the steppenwolf. He went on two legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in reality a wolf of the steppes. He had learned a good deal of all that people of a good intelligence can, and was a fairly clever fellow. What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life.”

— Hermann Hesse

483. “We recognized only one thing as our duty and destiny: every one of us had to become himself, had to be true to and live for the sake of the seed of nature at work in himself, so completely that the uncertain future would find us ready for anything and everything it might bring.”

— Hermann Hesse

484. “Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads. The ancient Asiatics knew this well enough, and in the Buddhist Yoga an exact technique was devised for unmasking the illusion of the personality. The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen.”

— Hermann Hesse

485. “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

486. “They slept profoundly, desperately, greedily, as though for the last time, as though they had been condemned to stay awake forever and had to drink in all the sleep in the world during these last hours.”

— Hermann Hesse

487. “I needed lust, the desire for possessions, vanity, and needed the most shameful despair, in order to learn how to give up all resistance, in order to learn how to love the world, in order to stop comparing it to some world I wished, I imagined, some kind of perfection I had made up, but to leave it as it is and to love it and to enjoy being a part of it. These, Govinda, are some of the thoughts which have come into my mind.”

— Hermann Hesse

488. “The kind of person we want to develop, the kind of person we aim to become, would at any time be able to exchange his discipline or art for any other.”

— Hermann Hesse

489. “The teachers apparently regarded a dead student very differently from a living one.”

— Hermann Hesse

490. “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

491. “What would many happy citizens and trustworthy officials have become but unruly, stormy innovators and dreamers of useless dreams, if not for the effort of their schools?”

— Hermann Hesse

492. “Intensity of life is only possible at the expense of self. But there is nothing members of the bourgeoisie value more highly than self, albeit only at a rudimentary stage of development. Thus, at the expense of intensity, they manage to preserve their selves and make them secure. Instead of possession by God, an easy conscience is the reward they reap; instead of desire, contentment; instead of liberty, cosiness; instead of life-threatening heat, an agreeable temperature.”

— Hermann Hesse

493. “There is, after all, always something wonderful and touchingly beautiful about a young man, for the first time released from the bonds of schooling, making his first ventures toward the infinite horizon of the mind. At this point he has not yet seen any of his illusions dissipated, or doubted either his own capacity for endless dedication or the boundlessness of the world of thought.”

— Hermann Hesse

494. “The whole of world history often seems to me nothing more than a picture book which portrays humanity’s most powerful and a senseless desire – the desire to forget. Does not each generation, by means of suppression, concealment, and ridicule, efface what the previous generation considered most important?”

— Hermann Hesse

495. “The Steppenwolf, however, first threw up his sharp, closely cropped head and sniffed around nervously before he either made any answer or announced his name. “Oh, it smells good here,” he said, and at that he smiled and my aunt smiled too.”

— Hermann Hesse

496. “Every life has its radiance and beauty.”

— Hermann Hesse

497. “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

498. “I don’t know. I really don’t know. Perhaps that would be best, I thought I wanted it myself. But today I’m no longer sure what I really want and desire. Before, everything was simple, as simple as letters in my textbook. Now nothing is simple any more, not even the letters. Everything has taken on many meanings and faces. I don’t know what will become of me, I can’t think about that now.”

— Hermann Hesse

499. “But it was right that it should be so; my eyes and heart acclaim it. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace, to hear Om again, to sleep deeply again and to awaken refreshed again. I had to become a fool again in order to find Atman in myself. I had to sin in order to live again. Whither will my path yet lead me?”

— Hermann Hesse

500. “As for others and the world around him he never ceased in his heroic and earnest endeavour to love them, to be just to them, to do them no harm, for the love of his neighbor was as deeply in him as the hatred of himself, and so his whole life was an example that love of one’s neighbor is not possible without love of oneself, and that self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.”

— Hermann Hesse