Top 500 Hermann Hesse Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “The realms of day and night. Two different worlds coming from two opposite poles mingled during this time.”

— Hermann Hesse

252. “I will learn from myself, be my own pupil; I will learn from myself the secret of Siddhartha.”

— Hermann Hesse

253. “Every sin already carries grace within in, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people – eternal life. The Buddha exists in the robber and dice player; the robber exists in the Brahmin.”

— Hermann Hesse

254. “One of the aphorisms occurred to me now and I wrote it under the picture: “Fate and temperament are two words for one and the same concept.” That was clear to me now.”

— Hermann Hesse

255. “Beautiful was this world, looking at it thus, without searching, thus simply, thus childlike. Beautiful were the moon and the stars, beautiful was the stream and the banks, the forest and the rocks, the goat and the golden beetle, the flower and the butterfly. It was beautiful and lovely to walk through the world, childlike and awake, open to what is near without distrust.”

— Hermann Hesse

256. “His way had therefore come full circle, or rather had taken the form of an ellipse or a spiral, following as ever no straight unbroken line, for the rectilinear belongs only to Geometry and not to Nature and Life.”

— Hermann Hesse

257. “Thankfully you tune the strings of your moldering lyre to a moderated, to a passably joyful, nay, to an even delighted psalm of thanksgiving and with it bore your quiet, flabby and slightly stupefied half-and-half god of contentment; and in the thick warm air of a contented boredom and very welcome painlessness the nodding mandarin of a half-and-half god and the nodding middle-aged gentleman who sings his muffled psalm look as like each other as two peas.”

— Hermann Hesse

258. “There are numerous ways in which God can make us lonely and lead us back to ourselves. This is the way He dealt with me at the time. It was like a bad dream.”

— Hermann Hesse

259. “I like listening to music, but only the kind you play, absolute music, the kind that makes you feel that someone is rattling at the doors if heaven and hell. I like music very much, I think, because it’s so unconcerned with morality.”

— Hermann Hesse

260. “I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn’t. I have always found moralizing intolerable.”

— Hermann Hesse

261. “Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.”

— Hermann Hesse

262. “We create gods and struggle with them, and they bless us.”

— Hermann Hesse

263. “Love is like death. It is fulfillment and an evening after which nothing more may follow.”

— Hermann Hesse

264. “Ich sehe, du denkst mehr, als du einem sagen kannst. Wenn das nun so ist, dann weisst du aber auch, dass du nie ganz das gelebt hast, was du dachtest, und das ist nicht gut. Nur das Denken, das wir leben, hat einen Wert.”

— Hermann Hesse

265. “Every politician in the world is all for revolution, reason, and disarmament-but only in enemy countries, not in his own.”

— Hermann Hesse

266. “Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.”

— Hermann Hesse

267. “I will not make a gift of myself, I must be won.”

— Hermann Hesse

268. “The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.”

— Hermann Hesse

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

— Hermann Hesse

270. “The reason why I do not know anything about myself, the reason why Siddhartha has remained alien and unknown to myself is due to one thing, to one single thing – I was afraid of myself, I was fleeing from myself. I was seeking Atman, I was seeking Brahman, I was determined to dismember myself and tear away its layers of husk in order to find in its unknown innermost recess the kernel at the heart of those layers, the Atman, life, the divine principle, the ultimate. But in so doing, I was losing myself.”

— Hermann Hesse

271. “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

272. “Look: We hate nothing that exists, not even death, suffering and dying, does not horrify our souls, as long as we learn more deeply to love.”

— Hermann Hesse

273. “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

274. “That’s like this: any truth can only be expressed and put into words when it is one-sided. Everything is one-sided which can be thought with thoughts and said with words, it’s all one-sided, all just one half, all lacks completeness, roundness, oneness.”

— Hermann Hesse

275. “Everything becomes questionable as soon as I consider it closely, everything slips away and dissolves.”

— Hermann Hesse

276. “It was still quiet in the house, and not a sound was heard from outside, either. Were it not for this silence, my reverie would probably have been disrupted by reminders of daily duties, of getting up and going to school.”

— Hermann Hesse

277. “Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.”

— Hermann Hesse

278. “The tree does not die, it waits.”

— Hermann Hesse

279. “I see that you think more than you can express. But, if that’s the case, you must also know that you have never fully lived out your thoughts, and that isn’t good. Only the thoughts that we live out have any value. You knew that your ‘permissible world’ was only half the world, and you tried to hide away the second half from yourself, the way clergymen and teachers do. You won’t succeed! No one can do that when he has once begun to think.”

— Hermann Hesse

280. “Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.”

— Hermann Hesse

281. “All of the waves and waters hastened, suffering, towards goals, many goals, to the waterfall, to the sea, to the current, to the ocean and all goals were reached and each one was succeeded by another. The water turned into vapour and rose, became rain and came down again, became spring, brook and river, changed anew, flowed anew.”

— Hermann Hesse

282. “Lovers should not separate from each other after making love without admiring each other, without being conquered as well as conquering, so that no feeling of satiation or desolation arises nor the horrid feeling of misusing or having been misused.”

— Hermann Hesse

283. “I am much inclined to live from my rucksack, and let my trousers fray as they like.”

— Hermann Hesse

284. “Every natural form is latent within us, originates in the soul whose essence is eternity, whose essence we cannot know but which most often intimates itself to us as the power to love and create.”

— Hermann Hesse

285. “I felt and saw the night outside deep within me. Wind and wetness, autumn, bitter smell of foliage, scattered leaves of the elm tree.”

— Hermann Hesse

286. “We can understand one another, but each of us can only interpret himself.”

— Hermann Hesse

287. “The golden trail was blazed and I was reminded of the eternal, of Mozart, of the stars. For an hour I could breathe again and live and face existence, without having to suffer torment, fear or shame.”

— Hermann Hesse

288. “Narcissus knew only too well what a charming golden bird had flown to him. This hermit soon sensed a kindred soul in Goldmund, in spite of their apparent contrasts. Narcissus was dark and spare; Goldmund, a radiant youth. Narcissus was analytical, a thinker; Goldmund, a dreamer with the soul of a child. But something they had in common bridged these contrasts: both were refined; both were different from the others because of obvious gifts and signs; both bore the special mark of fate.”

— Hermann Hesse

289. “I have no desire to walk on water,” said Siddhartha. “Let the old shramanas satisfy themselves with such skills.”

— Hermann Hesse

290. “Quien no lleva dentro un lobo no tiene por eso que ser feliz tampoco.”

— Hermann Hesse

291. “Perhaps that you’re searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don’t find the time for finding?” “How come?”

— Hermann Hesse

292. “A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life.”

— Hermann Hesse

293. “Perhaps you yourself have notions about the Glass Bead Game, expecting more of it than it will give you, or perhaps the reverse. There is no doubt that the Game has its dangers. For that very reason we love it; only the weak are sent out on paths without perils. But never forget what I have told you so often: our mission is to recognize contraries for what they are: first of all as contraries, but then as opposite poles of a unity. Such is the nature of the Glass Bead Game.”

— Hermann Hesse

294. “We can understand one another; but each one is able to explain only himself.”

— Hermann Hesse

295. “Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them.”

— Hermann Hesse

296. “But I need to feel beautiful and holy things around me, always: music, mystery cults, symbols, myths. I need it, and I refuse to give it up... That’s my fatal flaw.”

— Hermann Hesse

297. “Be aware of too much wisdom!”

— Hermann Hesse

298. “Many people say ‘they love nature,’ by which they mean they don’t dislike the charms nature displays before them. They go on outings, delight in the beauty of the earth as they trample meadows and tear off flowers and sprigs, only to discard them or let them wilt at home. That is how they love nature.”

— Hermann Hesse

299. “A thousand times I was ready to regret and take back my rash statement – yet it had been the truth.”

— Hermann Hesse

300. “Most people, Kamala, are like a falling leaf, which is blown and is turning around through the air, and wavers, and tumbles to the ground. But others, a few, are like stars, they go on a fixed course, no wind reaches them, in themselves they have their law and their course.”

— Hermann Hesse