Top 500 Hermann Hesse Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Mozart is waiting for me. Pablo is waiting for me.”

— Hermann Hesse

352. “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

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

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354. “In any case, the most lively young people become the best old people, not those who pretend to be as wise as grandfathers while they are still at school.”

— Hermann Hesse

355. “We fear death, we shudder at life’s instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.”

— Hermann Hesse

356. “It seems to have been my bad luck always to receive more than I could return, from life and friends.”

— Hermann Hesse

357. “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

358. “Liberation from ego is what we shramanas are seeking, O Exalted One. If I were your disciple, O Venerable One, I’m afraid it might befall me that my ego would be pacified and liberated only seemingly, only illusorily, that in reality it would survive and grow great, for then I would make the teaching, my discipleship, my love for you, and the community of the monks into my ego!”

— Hermann Hesse

359. “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

360. “Anyone who has hope is happy.”

— Hermann Hesse

361. “To die is to go into the Collective Unconscious, to lose oneself in order to be transformed into form, pure form.”

— Hermann Hesse

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

— Hermann Hesse

363. “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

364. “What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you’re searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don’t find the time for finding?”

— Hermann Hesse

365. “Wer lieben kann, ist glusklick.”

— Hermann Hesse

366. “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

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. “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

369. “I have become weary and distrustful of teaching and learning, and that I have little faith in words that come to us from teachers.”

— Hermann Hesse

370. “If a beautiful thing were to remain beautiful for all eternity, I’d be glad, but all the same I’d look at it with a colder eye. I’d say to myself: You can look at it any time, it doesn’t have to be today. But when I know that something is perishable and can’t last forever, I look at it with a feeling not just of joy but of compassion as well.”

— Hermann Hesse

371. “You could observe people’s folly, you could laugh at them or feel sorry for them, but you had to let them go their own way.”

— Hermann Hesse

372. “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. Many a one is a human-being above and a fish below.”

— Hermann Hesse

373. “If I were wise, I shouldn’t tell you. But I won’t be wise, Harry, not for this time. I’ll be just the opposite. So now mind what I say! You will hear it and forget it again. You will laugh over it, and you will weep over it. So look out! I am going to play with you for life and death, little brother, and before we begin the game I’m going to lay my cards on the table.”

— Hermann Hesse

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

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

— Hermann Hesse

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

385. “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

386. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

388. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

390. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

392. “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

393. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

395. “Words are not good for the secret meaning; everything always becomes a little bit different the moment one speaks it aloud, a bit falsified, a bit foolish – yes, and this too is also very good and pleases me greatly: that one person’s treasure and wisdom always sounds like foolishness to others.”

— Hermann Hesse

396. “I should not have had that fear of death when I wished for it all the same. The unhappiness that I need and long for is different. It is of the kind that will let me suffer with eagerness and lust after death. That is the unhappiness, or happiness, that I am waiting for.”

— Hermann Hesse

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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