Top 500 Hermann Hesse Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

257. “Wissen kann man mitteilen, Weisheit aber nicht. Man kann sie finden, man kann sie leben, man kann von ihr getragen werden, man kann mit ihr Wunder tun, aber sagen und lehren kann man sie nicht.”

— Hermann Hesse

258. “Charm me. Furiously. Torment me. In detail.”

— Hermann Hesse

259. “One can beg, buy, be presented with and find love in the streets, but it can never be stolen.”

— Hermann Hesse

260. “Without a mother, one cannot love. Without a mother, one cannot die.”

— Hermann Hesse

261. “To recognize causes is to think, and through thought alone feelings become knowledge and are not lost, but become real and begin to mature.”

— Hermann Hesse

Featured in: Real Quotes

262. “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

263. “The realms of day and night. Two different worlds coming from two opposite poles mingled during this time.”

— Hermann Hesse

264. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

273. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

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

— Hermann Hesse

276. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

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

— Hermann Hesse

Featured in: Real Quotes

279. “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

280. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

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

— Hermann Hesse

283. “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

284. “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

285. “The world has become lovelier. I am alone, and I don’t suffer from my loneliness. I don’t want life to be anything other than what it is.”

— Hermann Hesse

286. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

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

— Hermann Hesse

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

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

— Hermann Hesse

295. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

297. “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

298. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

300. “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