Top 500 Hermann Hesse Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “Love can be begged, bought, or received as a gift, one can find it in the street, but one cannot steal it.”

— Hermann Hesse

205. “It taught him how to listen – how to listen with a quiet heart and a waiting soul, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgment, without opinion.”

— Hermann Hesse

206. “Your soul has fallen to bits and pieces. Good. Rearrange them to suit yourself.”

— Hermann Hesse

207. “Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.”

— Hermann Hesse

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

— Hermann Hesse

209. “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? This path is stupid, it goes in spirals, perhaps in circles, but whichever way it goes, I will follow it. He was aware of a great happiness mounting within him.”

— Hermann Hesse

210. “That I know nothing about myself, that Siddhartha has remained thus alien and unknown to me, stems from one cause, a single cause: I was afraid of myself, I was fleeing from myself! I searched Atman, I searched Brahmin, I was willing to dissect myself and peel off all of its layers, to find the core of all peels in its unknown interior, the Atman, life, the divine part, the ultimate part. But I have lost myself in the process.”

— Hermann Hesse

211. “Fate and character are different names for the same idea.”

— Hermann Hesse

212. “For the first time in my life I tasted death, and death tasted bitter, for death is birth, is fear and dread of some terrible renewal.”

— Hermann Hesse

213. “People like you and me are quite lonely really but we still have each other, we have the secret satisfaction of being different, of rebelling, of desiring the unusual.”

— Hermann Hesse

214. “You are not strict with him, you do not punish him, you do not command him – because you know that gentleness is stronger than severity, that water is stronger than rock, that love is stronger than force.”

— Hermann Hesse

215. “Knulp was right in doing what his nature demanded and what few others could do, in speaking to strangers like a child and winning their hearts, in saying pleasant things to ladies of all ages, and making Sundays out of weekdays.”

— Hermann Hesse

216. “Animals are sad as a rule,” she went on. “And when a man is sad – I don’t mean because he has a toothache or has lost some money, but because he sees, for once in a way, how it all is with life and everything, and is sad in earnest – he always looks a little like an animal. He looks not only sad, but more right and more beautiful than usual. That’s how it is, and that’s how you looked, Steppenwolf, when I saw you for the first time.”

— Hermann Hesse

217. “In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified.”

— Hermann Hesse

218. “Siddhartha began to understand that it was not happiness and peace that had come to him with his son but, rather, sorrow and worry. But he loved him and preferred the sorrow and worry of love to the happiness and peace he had known without the boy.”

— Hermann Hesse

219. “Life is waiting everywhere, the future is flowering everywhere, but we only see a small part of it and step on much of it with our feet.”

— Hermann Hesse

220. “Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity.”

— Hermann Hesse

221. “The world, as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish – and it will.”

— Hermann Hesse

222. “But it’s a poor fellow who can’t take his pleasure without asking other people’s permission.”

— Hermann Hesse

223. “And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life.”

— Hermann Hesse

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

— Hermann Hesse

225. “Everyone gives what he has. The soldier gives strength, the merchant goods, the teacher instruction, the farmer rice, the fisherman fish.”

— Hermann Hesse

226. “What is the holding of breath? It is a flight from the Self, it is a temporary escape from the torment of Self. It is a temporary palliative against the pain and folly of life.”

— Hermann Hesse

227. “What is meditation? What is leaving one’s body? What is fasting? What is holding one’s breath? It is fleeing from the Self, it is a short escape of the agony of being a Self; it is a short numbing of the senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life.”

— Hermann Hesse

228. “What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.”

— Hermann Hesse

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

— Hermann Hesse

230. “And here is a doctrine at which you will laugh. It seems to me, Govinda, that love is the most important thing in the world.”

— Hermann Hesse

231. “Beautiful was this world, looking at it thus, without searching, thus simply, thus childlike.”

— Hermann Hesse

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

— Hermann Hesse

233. “The art of love-giving and taking become one.”

— Hermann Hesse

234. “When all the Self was conquered and dead, when all passions and desires were silent, then the last must awaken, the innermost of Being that is no longer Self – the great secret!”

— Hermann Hesse

235. “Narziss was dark and thin of face, and Goldmund open and radiant as a flower. Narziss was a thinker and anatomiser, Goldmund a dreamer and a child. Yet things common to both could bridge these differences. Both were knightly and delicate; both set apart by visible signs from their fellows, since both had received the particular admonishment of fate.”

— Hermann Hesse

236. “He looked around, as if he was seeing the world for the first time. Beautiful was the world, colorful was the world, strange and mysterious was the world! Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green, the sky and the river flowed, the forest and the mountains were rigid, all of it was beautiful, all of it was mysterious and magical, and in its midst was he, Siddhartha, the awakening one, on the path to himself.”

— Hermann Hesse

237. “Zo vallen rondom een herfstboom de bladeren, hij voelt het niet, regen stroomt van hem af, of zon, of vorst en binnenin hem trekt het leven zich tot het uiterste en verborgenste terug. Hij sterft niet. Hij wacht.”

— Hermann Hesse

238. “Als we iemand haten dan haten we in zijn beeld iets dat in onszelf huist. Wat niet in onszelf huist, windt ons niet op.”

— Hermann Hesse

239. “He waited, listening with deep enjoyment, for the end of the sonata. In the still, twilit corridor it sounded so lonely and unworldly, and so brave and innocent also, both childlike and superior, as all good music must in the midst of the unredeemed muteness of the world.”

— Hermann Hesse

240. “In the beginning was the myth.”

— Hermann Hesse

241. “All the books of the world full of thoughts and poems are nothing in comparison to a minute of sobbing, when feeling surges in waves, the soul feels itself profoundly and finds itself. Tears are the melting ice of snow. All angels are close to the crying person.”

— Hermann Hesse

242. “One can pass on knowledge but not wisdom. One can find wisdom, one can live it, one can be supported by it, one can work wonders with it, but one cannot speak it or teach it.”

— Hermann Hesse

243. “No one ever arrives home,” she said amiably. “But when the paths of friends meet, the whole world looks like home for a while.”

— Hermann Hesse

244. “We who bore the mark, felt no anxiety about the shape the future was to take. All of these faiths and teachings seemed to us already dead and useless. The only duty and destiny we acknowledged was that each one of us should become so completely himself, so utterly faithful to the active seed which nature planted within him, that in living out its growth he could be surprised by nothing unknown to come.”

— Hermann Hesse

245. “There are many ways in which the god can make us lonely and lead us to ourselves.”

— Hermann Hesse

246. “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

247. “To such men the desperate and horrible thought has come that perhaps the whole of human life is but a bad joke, a violent and ill-fated abortion of the primal mother, a savage and dismal catastophe of nature.”

— Hermann Hesse

248. “Into being a priest, into this arrogance, into this spirituality, his self had retreated, there it sat firmly and grew, while he thought he would kill it by fasting and penance.”

— Hermann Hesse

249. “He was pleased with everything that he did and learned and the days and months passed quickly. But he learned more from the river than Vasudeva could teach him. He learned from it continually. Above all, he learned from it how to listen, to listen with a still heart, with a waiting, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgment, without opinions.”

— Hermann Hesse

250. “Psychoanalysis has at bottom no other goal than to create a space within oneself in which God’s voice can be heard.”

— Hermann Hesse