Top 500 Hermann Hesse Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “And everything together, all voices, all goals, all yearning, all suffering, all pleasure, all that was good and evil, all of this together was the world. All of it together was the flow of events, was the music of life.”

— Hermann Hesse

402. “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

403. “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

404. “Once you are able to make your request in such a way that you will be quite certain of its fulfillment, then the fulfillment will come.”

— Hermann Hesse

405. “In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.”

— Hermann Hesse

406. “When trying to remember my share in the glow of the eternal present, in the smile of God, I return to my childhood, too, for that is where the most significant discoveries turn up.”

— Hermann Hesse

407. “Love between young people and love after many years of marriage is not the same thing.”

— Hermann Hesse

408. “It was lovely, and tempting, to exert power over men and to shine before others, but power also had its perditions and perils.”

— Hermann Hesse

409. “Most men will not swim before they are able to.’ Is not that witty? Naturally, they won’t swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they won’t think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.”

— Hermann Hesse

410. “He saw: this water ran and ran, incessantly it ran, and was nevertheless always there, was always at all times the same and yet new in every moment!”

— Hermann Hesse

411. “He lost himself a thousand times and for days one end he dwelt in nonbeing. But although the paths took him away from self, in the end they always led back to it.”

— Hermann Hesse

412. “My God, rather than come to such a pass it would have been better for the Jews and every one else, let alone the Egyptians, to have perished in those days and forthwith of a violent and becoming death instead of this dismal pretence of dying by inches that we go in for today. Yes indeed!”

— Hermann Hesse

413. “Once all of the Self was overcome and had died, once every desire and every urge was silent in the heart, then the ultimate part of me had to awake, the innermost of my being, which is no longer Self – the great secret.”

— Hermann Hesse

414. “But what a path it has been! I have had to pass through so much foolishness, so much vice, so much error, so much nausea and disillusionment and wretchedness, merely in order to become a child again and be able to start over. But all of this was just and proper.”

— Hermann Hesse

415. “Were not the gods forms created like me and you, mortal, transient?”

— Hermann Hesse

416. “But it seems that Abraxas has a much greater significance. We may look upon the name as that of a deity who had the symbolic task of combining the godlike and the devilish.” The.”

— Hermann Hesse

417. “Wer lieben kann, ist glusklick.”

— Hermann Hesse

418. “Teaching and surrounded by disciples, he was wandering through the land, with no property, with no home, with no wife, in the yellow cloak of an ascetic, but with a serene brow: a blissful man.”

— Hermann Hesse

419. “All I wanted was to try and realize whatever was in me. Why was that so difficult?”

— Hermann Hesse

420. “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

421. “One cannot apologize for something fundamental, and a child feels and knows this as well and as deeply as any sage.”

— Hermann Hesse

422. “Anyone who has hope is happy.”

— Hermann Hesse

423. “Perfect music has its cause. It arises from equilibrium. Equilibrium arises from righteousness, and righteousness arises from the meaning of the cosmos. Therefore one can speak about music only with a man who has perceived the meaning of the cosmos.”

— Hermann Hesse

424. “For me, however, that beloved, glowing little word happiness has become associated with everything I have felt since childhood upon hearing the sound of the word itself.”

— Hermann Hesse

425. “I am homeless, a Brahmin’s son and a samana.”

— Hermann Hesse

426. “For the air of lonely men surrounded him now, a still atmosphere in which the world around him slipped away, leaving him incapable of relationship, an atmosphere against which neither will nor longing availed. This was one of the significant earmarks of his life.”

— Hermann Hesse

427. “You should not take old people who are already dead seriously. It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don’t mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.”

— Hermann Hesse

428. “I am superior to you only in one point: I’m awake, whereas you are only half awake, or completely asleep sometimes. I call a man awake who knows in his conscious reason his innermost unreasonable force, drives, and weaknesses and knows how to deal with them.”

— Hermann Hesse

429. “I was a gamble of Nature, a throw of the dice into an uncertain realm, leading perhaps to something new, perhaps to nothing; and to let this throw from the primordial depths take effect, to feel its will inside myself and adopt it completely as my own will: that alone was my vocation. That alone! I.”

— Hermann Hesse

430. “I had grown a thin mustache, I was a full-grown man, and yet I was completely helpless and without a goal in life.”

— Hermann Hesse

431. “You broke through the humor of my little theater and tried to make a mess of it, stabbing with knives and spattering our pretty picture-world with the mud of reality.”

— Hermann Hesse

432. “Was it not his Self, his small, fearful and proud Self, with which he had wrestled for so many years, but which had always conquered him again, which appeared each time again and again, which robbed him of happiness and filled him with fear?”

— Hermann Hesse

433. “My resolve to die was not the whim of an hour. It was the ripe, sound fruit that had slowly grown to full size, lightly rocked by the winds of fate whose next breath would bring it to the ground.”

— Hermann Hesse

434. “No, there was no teaching a truly searching person, someone who truly wanted to find, could accept. But he who had found, he could approve of any teachings, every path, every goal, there was nothing standing between him and all the other thousand any more who lived in that what is eternal, who breathed what is divine.”

— Hermann Hesse

435. “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

436. “In my brain were stored a thousand pictures.”

— Hermann Hesse

437. “If I were to reduce all my feelings and their painful conflicts to a single name, I can think of no other word but: dread. It was dread, dread and uncertainty, that I felt in all those hours of shattered childhood felicity: dread of punishment, dread of my own conscience, dread of stirrings in my soul which I considered forbidden and criminal.”

— Hermann Hesse

438. “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

439. “He brooded on how close destruction always was to all creatures, animals as well as humans, and he realized that there is nothing we can predict or know for certain in this world except death.”

— Hermann Hesse

440. “It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.”

— Hermann Hesse

441. “For it cannot be denied that all over the world and in all ages there are beings who are perceived to be extraordinary, charming, and appealing, and whom many honor as benevolent spirits, because they make one think of a more beautiful, a freer, a more winged life than the one we lead.”

— Hermann Hesse

442. “Things are going downhill with you!′ he said to himself, and laughed about it, and as he was saying it, he happened to glance at the river, and he also saw the river going downhill, always moving on downhill, and singing and being happy through it all.”

— Hermann Hesse

443. “But though the ways led away from the self, their end nevertheless always led back to the self.”

— Hermann Hesse

444. “I pondered my friend’s words. I liked best what he had said about the fireballs since I myself often had the same feeling. The quiet spell of the colored flame, rising into the darkness and all too soon drowning in it, struck me as a symbol of all human pleasure, for the more beautiful it is, the less it satisfies us and the more quickly it is spent.”

— Hermann Hesse

445. “The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been given back to me today by this friend of mine who taught me dancing.”

— Hermann Hesse

446. “To hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony.”

— Hermann Hesse

447. “For awakened human beings, there was no obligation – none, none, none at all – except this: to search for yourself, become sure of yourself, feel your way forward along your own path, wherever it led.”

— Hermann Hesse

448. “You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality. That is the prison where you lie.”

— Hermann Hesse

449. “Look, my dear Govinda, this is one of my thoughts, which I have found: wisdom cannot be passed on. Wisdom which a wise man tries to pass on to someone always sounds like foolishness.” “Are you kidding?” asked Govinda. “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.”

— Hermann Hesse

450. “For him, behind every feeling and thought was the sense of the open door leading into nothingness. To be sure, he suffered from dread of many things, of madness, the police, insomnia, and also dread of death. But everything he dreaded he likewise desired and longed for at the same time. He was full of burning curiosity about suffering, destruction, persecution, madness and death.”

— Hermann Hesse