Top 500 Hermann Hesse Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

406. “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

407. “Wer lieben kann, ist glusklick.”

— Hermann Hesse

408. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

410. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

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

— Hermann Hesse

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

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. “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

418. “When someone is searching then it might easily happen that the only thing his eyes still see is that what he searches for, that he is unable to find anything, to let anything enter his mind, because he always thinks of nothing but the object of his search. Searching means: having a goal. Finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.”

— Hermann Hesse

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

426. “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

427. “Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.”

— Hermann Hesse

428. “There had been a quarrel, she had been hurt, had wept. Now it was over; now she sat still and waited. Life would go on. As with children. As with animals. If only you did not talk, did not make simple things complicated, did not turn your soul inside out.”

— Hermann Hesse

429. “But living alone forever and ever, among the quietly sleeping tree trunks, with animals that ran away, with whom one could not speak – that would be unbearably sad.”

— Hermann Hesse

430. “I call a man awake who knows in his conscious reason his innermost unreasonable forces, drives, and weaknesses and knows how to deal with them.”

— Hermann Hesse

431. “During the dark hours I felt my sick heart expand and beat more furiously, and I no longer made any distinction between pleasure and pain, but one was similar to the other; both hurt and both were precious. Whether my inner life went well or badly, my discovered strength stood peacefully outside looking on and knew that light and dark were closely related and that sorrow and peace were rhythm, part and spirit of the same great music.”

— Hermann Hesse

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

435. “He waited, listening with deep enjoyment, for the end of the sonata. In the still, twilit corridor it sounded so lonely and unworldly, and so brave and innocent also, both childlike and superior, as all good music must in the midst of the unredeemed muteness of the world.”

— Hermann Hesse

436. “Anyone who has hope is happy.”

— Hermann Hesse

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

— Hermann Hesse

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

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

— Hermann Hesse

442. “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

443. “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

444. “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

445. “I paint because I have no tail to wag.”

— Hermann Hesse

446. “Is not every life, every work fine?”

— Hermann Hesse

447. “Deeply, he felt the love for the run-away in his heart, like a wound, and he felt at the same time that this wound had not been given to him in order to turn the knife in it, that it had to become a blossom and had to shine.”

— Hermann Hesse

448. “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

449. “I realised that all this talk was of no value and at its best only led to clever phrases.”

— Hermann Hesse

450. “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