Top 500 Hermann Hesse Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “His face was still more clever and spiritual than others, but it seldom smiled, and one after the other it was taking on the traits one so often observes in the faces of the wealthy: that look of dissatisfaction, infirmity, displeasure, lethargy, unkindness. Slowly he was being stricken with the maladies that afflict rich people’s souls.”

— Hermann Hesse

352. “Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One’s born and at once one is guilty. You must have had a remarkable sort of religious education if you did not know that.”

— Hermann Hesse

353. “What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.”

— Hermann Hesse

354. “There’s something to walking with autumnal thoughts through the evening fog. One likes to compose poems at a time like that.”

— Hermann Hesse

355. “My lie has been miserable and difficult, and yet to others and sometimes to myself, it has seemed rich and wonderful. Man’s life seems to me like a long, weary night that would be intolerable if there were not occasionally flashes of light, the sudden brightness of which is so comforting and wonderful, that the moments of their appearance cancel out and justify the years of darkness.”

— Hermann Hesse

356. “She stood a moment before my eyes, clearly and painfully, loved and deeply woven into my destiny; then fell away again in a deep oblivion, at a half regretted distance.”

— Hermann Hesse

357. “I’m not kidding. I’m telling you what I’ve found. 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. This was what I, even as a young man, sometimes suspected, what has driven me away from the teachers.”

— Hermann Hesse

358. “Time is not real, Govinda, I have experienced this often and often again. And if time is not real, then the gap which seems to be between the world and the eternity, between suffering and blissfulness, between evil and good, is also a deception.”

— Hermann Hesse

359. “Nevertheless, whether in occurrences lasting days, hours or mere minutes at a time, I have experienced happiness often, and have had brief encounters with it in my later years, even in old age.”

— Hermann Hesse

360. “She taught him, that lovers must not part from one another after celebrating love, without one admiring the other, without being just as defeated as they have been victorious, so that with none of them should start feeling fed up or bored and get that evil feeling of having abused or having been abused.”

— Hermann Hesse

361. “The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect, or on a slow path towards perfection: no, it is perfect in every moment, all sin already carries the divine forgiveness in itself.”

— Hermann Hesse

362. “I believe that the struggle against death, the unconditional and self-willed determination to live, is the mode of power behind the lives and activities of all outstanding men.”

— Hermann Hesse

363. “Nothing was, nothing will be; everything is, everything has existence and is present.”

— Hermann Hesse

364. “Searching means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.”

— Hermann Hesse

365. “We who bore the mark might well be considered by the rest of the world as strange, even as insane and dangerous. We had awoken, or were awaking, and we were striving for an ever more perfect state of wakefulness, whereas the ambition and quest for happiness of the others consisted of linking their opinions, ideals, and duties, their life and happiness, ever more closely with those of the herd.”

— Hermann Hesse

366. “I have known it for a long time but I have only just experienced it. Now I know it not only with my intellect, but with my eyes, with my heart, with my stomach.”

— Hermann Hesse

367. “Once in their youth the light shone for them; they saw the light and followed the star, but then came reason and the mockery of the world; then came faint-heartedness and apparent failure; then came weariness and disillusionment, and so they lost their way again, they became blind again.”

— Hermann Hesse

368. “That seems to be the way of things. Everyone takes, everyone gives. Life is like that.”

— Hermann Hesse

369. “Obeying is like eating and drinking. There’s nothing like it if you’ve been without it for too long.”

— Hermann Hesse

370. “Water wants to join water. Youth wants to join youth.”

— Hermann Hesse

371. “And all this, I said, just as today was the case with the beginnings of wireless, would be of no more service to man than as an escape from himself and his true aims, and a means of surrounding himself with an ever closer mesh of distractions and useless activities.”

— Hermann Hesse

372. “That is why we were drawn to one another and why we are brother and sister. I am going to teach you to dance and play and smile, and still not be happy. And you are going to teach me to think and to know and yet not be happy. Do you know that we are both children of the Devil?”

— Hermann Hesse

373. “I closed my eyes obediently; I felt a light kiss on my lips, on which there was always a little accumulation of blood that wouldn’t decrease. And then I fell asleep.”

— Hermann Hesse

374. “Disclosing his wound to this listener was the same as bathing it in the river, until it became cool and one with the river.”

— Hermann Hesse

375. “Sentimentality is a basking in feelings that in reality you don’t take seriously enough to make the slightest sacrifice to or ever translate into action.”

— Hermann Hesse

376. “He had very few doubts, and when the facts contradicted his views on life, he shut his eyes in disapproval.”

— Hermann Hesse

377. “I had considered myself some kind of genius and had considerably underestimated the toils and difficulties encountered along the path to an art.”

— Hermann Hesse

378. “I sped through heaven and saw god at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defenses and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart.”

— Hermann Hesse

379. “Every true reader could, even if not one new book were published, spend decades and centuries studying on, fighting on, continuing to rejoice in the treasure of those already at hand.”

— Hermann Hesse

380. “The mind cannot live in nature, only against nature, only as its counterpart.”

— Hermann Hesse

381. “At one time I had given much thought to why men were so very rarely capable of living for an ideal. Now I saw that many, no, all men were capable of dying for one.”

— Hermann Hesse

382. “All being, it seemed, was built on opposites, on division. Man or woman, vagabond or citizen, lover or thinker – no breath could both be in and out, none could be man and wife, free and yet orderly, knowing the urge of life and the joy of intellect. Always the one paid for the other, though each was equally precious and essential.”

— Hermann Hesse

383. “Like a wallflower he stayed in the background waiting for someone to fetch him, someone more courageous and stronger than himself to tear him away and force him into happiness.”

— Hermann Hesse

384. “I had to become a fool, to find Atman in me again. I had to sin, to be able to live again. Where else might my path lead me to? It is foolish, this path, it moves in loops, perhaps it is going around in a circle. Let it go as it likes, I want to to take it.”

— Hermann Hesse

385. “Therefore, it seems to me that everything that exists is good – death as well as life, sin as well as holiness, wisdom as well as folly. 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

386. “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. Many a one never becomes a human being, but remains a frog, lizard, or ant.”

— Hermann Hesse

387. “As far as teachers are concerned, they define young geniuses as those who are bad, disrespectful, smoke at fourteen, fall in love at fifteen, can be found at sixteen hanging out in bars, read forbidden books, write scandalous essays, occasionally stare down a teacher in class, are marked in the attendance book as rebels, and are budding candidates for room-arrest.”

— Hermann Hesse

388. “Examine a person closely enough and you know more about him than he does himself.”

— Hermann Hesse

389. “Some day you will think of what I am going to say to you now: our friendship has no other purpose, no other reason, than to show you how utterly unlike me you are.”

— Hermann Hesse

390. “No, my dear, how should I be sad? I, who have been rich and happy, have become even richer and happier now. My son has been given to me.”

— Hermann Hesse

391. “Each of us is merely one human being, merely an experiment, a way station. But each of us should be on the way toward perfection, should be striving to reach the center, not the periphery.”

— Hermann Hesse

392. “Forgive me, father, I am not certain what my own wishes are. I shall always take pleasure in study, how could it be otherwise? But I do not believe that my life will be limited to study. A man’s wishes may not always determine his destiny, his mission; perhaps there are other predetermining factors.”

— Hermann Hesse

393. “All interpretation, all psychology, all attempts to make things comprehensible, require the medium of theories, mythologies, and lies.”

— Hermann Hesse

394. “That life is difficult, I have often bitterly realized.”

— Hermann Hesse

395. “Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One’s born and at once one is guilty.”

— Hermann Hesse

396. “There I often walked along the shore, listened to the sea, and thought as I had done in my youth, with amazement and horror, about the sad and senseless confusion of life, that one could love in vain, that people who meant well toward each other should work out their destinies separately, each one going his own inexplicable way, and how each would like to help and draw close to the other and yet was unable to do so, as in troubled meaningless dreams.”

— Hermann Hesse

397. “All of this had always existed, and he had not seen it; he had not been with it. Now he was with it, he was part of it. Light and shadow ran through his eyes, stars and moon ran through his heart. On.”

— Hermann Hesse

398. “For every true statement there is an opposite one that is also true; that language and the confines of time lead people to adhere to one fixed belief that does not account for the fullness of the truth. Because nature works in a self-sustaining cycle, every entity carries in it the potential for its opposite and so the world must always be considered complete.”

— Hermann Hesse

399. “I am curious to see all the same just how much a man can endure. If the limit of what is bearable is reached, I have only to open the door to escape.”

— Hermann Hesse

400. “Oh, I know it today: nothing in the world is more repugnant to a man than following the path that leads him to himself!”

— Hermann Hesse