Top 500 Hermann Hesse Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.”

— Hermann Hesse

102. “The opposite of every truth is just as true.”

— Hermann Hesse

103. “When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.”

— Hermann Hesse

104. “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

105. “Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long.”

— Hermann Hesse

106. “The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.”

— Hermann Hesse

107. “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

108. “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.”

— Hermann Hesse

109. “How foolish it is to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence.”

— Hermann Hesse

110. “The world was beautiful when looked at in this way-without any seeking, so simple, so childlike.”

— Hermann Hesse

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

— Hermann Hesse

112. “Did all this make sense?”

— Hermann Hesse

113. “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

114. “The truth has a million faces, but there is only one truth.”

— Hermann Hesse

115. “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.”

— Hermann Hesse

116. “Whether you and I and a few others will renew the world some day remains to be seen. But within ourselves we must renew it each day.”

— Hermann Hesse

117. “Every experience has its element of magic.”

— Hermann Hesse

118. “All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?”

— Hermann Hesse

119. “Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.”

— Hermann Hesse

120. “Ich wollte ja nichts als das zu leben versuchen, was von selber aus mir heraus wollte. Warum war das so sehr schwer?”

— Hermann Hesse

121. “Good that you ask – you should always ask, always have doubts.”

— Hermann Hesse

122. “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

123. “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

124. “There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.”

— Hermann Hesse

125. “Wenn wir einen Menschen hassen, so hassen wir in seinem Bild etwas, was in uns selber sitzt. Was nicht in uns selber ist, das regt uns nicht auf.”

— Hermann Hesse

126. “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

127. “Every man’s story is important, eternal and sacred. That is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous and worthy of every consideration.”

— Hermann Hesse

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

— Hermann Hesse

129. “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.”

— Hermann Hesse

130. “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

131. “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.”

— Hermann Hesse

132. “Every healthy person must have a goal in life and that life must have content.”

— Hermann Hesse

133. “I shall begin my story with an experience I had when I was ten and attended our small town’s Latin school.”

— Hermann Hesse

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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.”

— Hermann Hesse

137. “A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to committ outrages...”

— Hermann Hesse

138. “Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.”

— Hermann Hesse

139. “One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.”

— Hermann Hesse

140. “In fear I hurried this way and that. I had the taste of blood and chocolate in my mouth, the one as hateful as the other.”

— Hermann Hesse

141. “Everything that was not suffered to the end and finally concluded, recurred, and the same sorrows were undergone.”

— Hermann Hesse

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

— Hermann Hesse

143. “He saw that the water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new.”

— Hermann Hesse

144. “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

145. “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.”

— Hermann Hesse

146. “I felt knowledge and the unity of the world circulate in me like my own blood.”

— Hermann Hesse

147. “You must find your dream, then the way becomes easy.”

— Hermann Hesse

148. “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

149. “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.”

— Hermann Hesse

150. “Faith is stronger than so-called reason.”

— Hermann Hesse