Top 500 Hermann Hesse Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “If my life were not a dangerous, painful experiment, if I did not constantly skirt the abyss and feel the void under my feet, my life would have no meaning and I would not have been able to write anything.”

— Hermann Hesse

152. “When the suffering becomes acute enough, one goes forward.”

— Hermann Hesse

153. “What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world.”

— Hermann Hesse

154. “You knew all along that your sanctioned world was only half the world, and you tried to suppress the other half the same way the priests and teachers do. You won’t succeed. No one succeeds in this once he has begun to think.”

— Hermann Hesse

155. “Love must neither beg nor demand. Love must be strong enough to find certainty within itself. It then cease to be moved and becomes the mover.”

— Hermann Hesse

156. “Manche denken, Festhalten macht uns stark. Aber manchmal ist es das Loslassen.”

— Hermann Hesse

157. “It is extremely beautiful to belong to a woman, to give yourself. Don’t laugh if I sound foolish. But to love a woman, you see, to abandon yourself to her, to absorb her completely and feel absorbed by her, that is not what you call ‘being in love,’ which you mock a little. For me it is the road to life, the way toward the meaning of life.”

— Hermann Hesse

158. “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

159. “The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.”

— Hermann Hesse

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

— Hermann Hesse

161. “One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too.”

— Hermann Hesse

162. “Dreams and restless thoughts came flowing to him from the river, from the twinkling stars at night, from the sun’s melting rays. Dreams and a restlessness of the soul came to him.”

— Hermann Hesse

163. “So you find yourself surrounded by death and horror in the world, and you escape it into lust. But lust has no duration; it leaves you again in the desert.”

— Hermann Hesse

164. “The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life.”

— Hermann Hesse

165. “What you search is not necessarily the same as what you find. When you let go of the searching, you start finding.”

— Hermann Hesse

166. “To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.”

— Hermann Hesse

167. “I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am responsible for what I do with the life I’ve got.”

— Hermann Hesse

168. “This happiness consisted of nothing else but the harmony of the few things around me with my own existence, a feeling of contentment and well-being that needed no changes and no intensification.”

— Hermann Hesse

169. “Abraxas was the god who was both god and devil.”

— Hermann Hesse

170. “Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can – that is their secret.”

— Hermann Hesse

171. “I, also, would like to look and smile, sit and walk like that, so free, so worthy, so restrained, so candid, so childlike and mysterious. A man only looks and walks like that when he has conquered his Self. I also will conquer my Self.”

— Hermann Hesse

172. “It was the first rent in the holy image of my father, it was the first fissure in the columns that had upheld my childhood, which every individual must destroy before he can become himself.”

— Hermann Hesse

173. “If a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do.”

— Hermann Hesse

174. “Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding, and to fulfill their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side.”

— Hermann Hesse

175. “I saw Demian’s face and remarked that it was not a boy’s face but a man’s and then I saw, or rather became aware, that it was not really the face of a man either; it had something different about it, almost a feminine element. And for the time being his face seemed neither masculine nor childish, neither old nor young but a hundred years old, almost timeless and bearing the mark of other periods of history than our own.”

— Hermann Hesse

176. “Everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my loving understanding; then all is well with me and nothing can harm me.”

— Hermann Hesse

177. “What for me is bliss and life and ecstasy and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in life it finds it absurd.”

— Hermann Hesse

178. “And whether this happiness lasted a hundred seconds or ten minutes, it was so far removed from time that it resembled every other genuine happiness as completely as one fluttering blue lycaenid butterfly resembles another.”

— Hermann Hesse

179. “We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, affliction, or infamy. We kill when, because it is easier, we countenance, or pretend to approve of atrophied social, political, educational, and religious institutions, instead of resolutely combating them.”

— Hermann Hesse

180. “Everyone had only one true vocation: to find himself. Let him wind up as a poet or a madman, as a prophet or a criminal – that wasn’t his business; in the long run, it was irrelevant. His business was to discover his own destiny, not just any destiny, and to live it totally and undividedly. Anything else was just a half-measure, an attempt to run away, an escape back to the ideal of the masses, an adaptation, fear of one’s own nature.”

— Hermann Hesse

181. “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

182. “A mere nothing suffices – and the lightning strikes.”

— Hermann Hesse

183. “Everyone can reach his goal, if he can think, wait and fast.”

— Hermann Hesse

184. “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

185. “The words are not good for the secret meaning, everything always becomes a bit different, as soon as it is put into words, gets distorted a bit, a bit silly – yes, and this is also very good, and I like it a lot, I also very much agree with this, that this what is one man’s treasure and wisdom always sounds like foolishness to another person.”

— Hermann Hesse

186. “Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.”

— Hermann Hesse

187. “Each of us has to find out for himself what is permitted and what is forbidden... forbidden for him. It’s possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard. And vice versa.”

— Hermann Hesse

188. “The voices of all creatures are in the voices of the river.”

— Hermann Hesse

189. “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

190. “For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves.”

— Hermann Hesse

191. “Every important cultural gesture comes down to a morality, a model for human behavior concentrated into a gesture.”

— Hermann Hesse

192. “Friendship is identification and difference.”

— Hermann Hesse

193. “If the chick is not able to break the shell of his egg, he will die without being born. We are – chick. The world – is our egg. If we do not break the shell of the world, then we will die without being born.”

— Hermann Hesse

194. “Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence.”

— Hermann Hesse

195. “Smiling, Siddhartha felt happiness at the friendship and friendliness of the ferryman. He is like Govinda, he thought, smiling. All the people I meet upon my way are like Govinda. All of them are grateful, though they themselves have cause to expect gratitude. All of them are deferential, all are eager to be a friend, to obey and think little. People are children.”

— Hermann Hesse

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

— Hermann Hesse

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

— Hermann Hesse

198. “In this hour, Siddhartha stopped fighting his fate, stopped suffering. On his face flourished the cheerfulness of a knowledge, which is no longer opposed by any will, which knows perfection, which is in agreement with the flow of events, with the current of life, full of sympathy for the pain of others, full of sympathy for the pleasure of others, devoted to the flow, belonging to the oneness.”

— Hermann Hesse

199. “Every person’s life is a journey toward himself, the attempt at a journey, the intimation of a path. No person has ever been completely himself, but each one strives to become so, some gropingly, others more lucidly, according to his abilities. Each one carries with him to the end traces of his birth, the slime and eggshells of a primordial world.”

— Hermann Hesse

200. “In the beginning was the myth. God, in his search for self -expression, invested the souls of Hindus, Greeks, and Germans with poetic shapes and continues to invest each child ’s soul with poetry every day.”

— Hermann Hesse