Top 500 Hermann Hesse Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

453. “Look, my dear Govinda, this is one of my thoughts, which I have found: wisdom cannot be passed on. Wisdom which a wise man tries to pass on to someone always sounds like foolishness.” “Are you kidding?” asked Govinda. “I’m not kidding. I’m telling you what I’ve found. Knowledge can be conveyed, but not wisdom. It can be found, it can be lived, it is possible to be carried by it, miracles can be performed with it, but it cannot be expressed in words and taught.”

— Hermann Hesse

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

— Hermann Hesse

455. “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

456. “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

457. “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

458. “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

459. “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

460. “Now and then I have expressed the opinion that every nation, and every person, would do better, instead of rocking himself to sleep with political catchwords about war-guilt, to ask himself how far his own faults and negligencies and evil tendencies are guilty of the war and all the other wrongs of the world, and that there lies the only possible means of avoiding the next war.”

— Hermann Hesse

461. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

463. “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

464. “For awakened human beings, there was no obligation – none, none, none at all – except this: to search for yourself, become sure of yourself, feel your way forward along your own path, wherever it led.”

— Hermann Hesse

465. “You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality. That is the prison where you lie.”

— Hermann Hesse

466. “I should not have had that fear of death when I wished for it all the same. The unhappiness that I need and long for is different. It is of the kind that will let me suffer with eagerness and lust after death. That is the unhappiness, or happiness, that I am waiting for.”

— Hermann Hesse

467. “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

468. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

470. “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

471. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

473. “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

474. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

476. “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

477. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

479. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

481. “For him, behind every feeling and thought was the sense of the open door leading into nothingness. To be sure, he suffered from dread of many things, of madness, the police, insomnia, and also dread of death. But everything he dreaded he likewise desired and longed for at the same time. He was full of burning curiosity about suffering, destruction, persecution, madness and death.”

— Hermann Hesse

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

485. “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.”

— Hermann Hesse

486. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

488. “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

489. “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

490. “All the women of this fevered night, all that I had danced with, all whom I had kindled or who have kindled me, all whom I had courted, all who had clung to me with longing, all whom I had followed with enraptured eyes were melted together and had become one, the one whom I held in my arms.”

— Hermann Hesse

491. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

493. “All existence seemed to be based on duality, on contrast. Either one was a man or one was a woman, either a wanderer or sedentary burgher, either a thinking person or a feeling person-no one could breathe in at the same time as he breathed out, be a man as well as a woman, experience freedom as well as order, combine instinct and mind. One always had to pay for one with the loss of the other, and one thing was always just as important and desirable as the other.”

— Hermann Hesse

494. “Man is a dubious mixture of mind and matter; since the mind unlocks recognition of the eternal to him, while matter pulls him down and binds him to the transitory, he should strive away from the senses and toward the mind if he wishes to elevate his life and give it meaning.”

— Hermann Hesse

495. “I thought of nothing but her. I expected everything from her. I was ready to lay everything at her feet. I was not in the least in love with her. Yet I had only to imagine that she might fail to keep the appointment, or forget it, to see where I stood. Then the world would be a desert once more, one day as dreary and worthless as the last, and the deathly stillness and wretchedness would surround me once more on all sides with no way out from this hell of silence except the razor.”

— Hermann Hesse

496. “Times of terror and the deepest misery may arrive, but if there is to be any happiness in this misery it can only be a spiritual happiness, related to the past in the rescue of the culture of early ages and to the future in a serene and indefatigable championship of the spirit in a time which would otherwise completely swallow up the material.”

— Hermann Hesse

497. “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

498. “We passed for jolly, unruly, even dangerous rioters, which was untrue of me, and we enjoyed a doubtful but heroic reputation.”

— Hermann Hesse

499. “He could have exchanged his name and address with any of his neighbours, and nothing would have been different.”

— Hermann Hesse

500. “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