Hermann Hesse Quotes & Sayings

Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure. — Hermann Hesse

Man designs for himself a garden with a hundred kinds of trees, a thousand kinds of flowers, a hundred kinds of fruit and vegetables. Suppose, then, that the gardener of this garden knew no other distinction between edible and inedible, nine-tenths of this garden would be useless to him. He would pull up the most enchanting flowers and hew down the noblest trees and even regard them with a loathing and envious eye. This is what the Steppenwolf does with the thousand flowers of his soul. What does not stand classified as either man or wolf he does not see at all. — Hermann Hesse

No one had any objection when I suggested another detour shortly before reaching town. We turned on to a lovely road that ran high above the valley in a semi-circle , rich in extensive views over the valley, river and town, which, in the distance, was already aglow with rows of bright lamps and thousands of rosy lights. — Hermann Hesse

Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them. — Hermann Hesse

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

Solitude is independence. — Hermann Hesse

He saw that the water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new. — Hermann Hesse

When a writer receives praise or blame, when he arouses sympathy or is ridiculed, when he is loved or rejected, it is not on the strength of his thoughts and dreams as a whole, but only of that infinitesimal part which has been able to make its way through the narrow channel of language and the equally narrow channel of the reader's understanding. — Hermann Hesse

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

Men of dreams, the lovers and the poets, are better in most things than the men of my sort; the men of intellect. You take your being from your mothers. You live to the full: it is given you to love with your whole strength, to know and taste the whole of life. We thinkers, though often we seem to rule you, cannot live with half your joy and full reality. Ours is a thin and arid life, but the fullness of being is yours; yours the sap of the fruit, the garden of lovers, the joyous pleasaunces of beauty. Your home is the earth, ours the idea of it. Your danger is to be drowned in the world of sense, ours to gasp for breath in airless space. You are a poet, I a thinker. You sleep on your mother's breast, I watch in the wilderness. On me there shines the sun; on you the moon with all the stars. Your dreams are all of girls, mine of boys - — Hermann Hesse

The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment, every sin already carries grace in it. — Hermann Hesse

By degrees during the afternoon he warmed and became alive, and only towards evening, on his good days, was he productive, active and, sometimes, aglow with joy. — Hermann Hesse

All life is a breath exhaled by God. All dying is a breath inhaled by God. — Hermann Hesse

Look at a person carefully long enough, and you'll know more about him than he himself does." The — Hermann Hesse

Both, the thoughts as well as the senses, were pretty things, the ultimate meaning was hidden behind both of them, — Hermann Hesse

I want to learn from myself, want to be my student, want to get to know myself, the secret of Siddhartha. — Hermann Hesse

It enraged and exhausted me to observe how the common daily life callously demanded its due and devoured the abundance of optimism I had brought with me. — Hermann Hesse

We all come out of the same abyss; but each of us, a trial throw of the dice from the depths, strives toward his own goal. — Hermann Hesse

a very beautiful river, I love it more than anything.
Often I have listened to it, often I have looked into its eyes, and
always I have learned from it. Much can be learned from a river. — Hermann Hesse

Om is the bow, the arrow is soul, The Brahman is the arrow's target that one should incessantly hit. — Hermann Hesse

Good that you ask
you should always ask, always have doubts. — Hermann Hesse

I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us. — Hermann Hesse

Thus Gotama [Buddha] walked toward the town to gather alms, and the two samanas recognized him solely by the perfection of his repose, by the calmness of his figure, in which there was no trace of seeking, desiring, imitating, or striving, only light and peace — Hermann Hesse

The devil has spit in the soup. Nothing comes out even. Nothing sounds right. Nothing rejoices and warms. Everything is desolate, sad, foul. All strings out of tune. All colors faded. — Hermann Hesse

Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours. — Hermann Hesse

All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened. — Hermann Hesse

Love must not entreat,' she added, 'or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract. — Hermann Hesse

That is the way leaves fall around a tree in autumn, a tree unaware of the rain running down its sides, of the sun or the frost, and of life gradually retreating inward. The tree does not die. It waits. — Hermann Hesse

Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak ... surrender to them. Don't ask first whether it's permitted, or would please your teachers or father or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that. — Hermann Hesse

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, the longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. — Hermann Hesse

Here, too, I found neither home nor company, nothing but a seat from which to view a stage where strange people played strange parts. — Hermann Hesse

I have become distrustful of teachings and learning, and I have little faith in words that come to us from teachers. But, very well, my friend - I am ready to hear this new teaching, although I believe in my heart that I have already tasted the best fruit of it. — Hermann Hesse

Was it not a comedy, a strange and stupid matter, this repetition, this running around in a fateful circle? — Hermann Hesse

To you, differences are quite unimportant; to me, they are what matters most. I am a scholar by nature; science is my vocation. And science is, to quote your words, nothing but the 'determination to establish differences.' Its essence couldn't be defined more accurately. For us, the men of science, nothing is as important as the establishment of differences; science is the art of differentiation. Discovering in every man that which distinguishes him from others is to know him. — Hermann Hesse

There is much that I could say about the happy and tender incidents in my childhood days, the sense of security which I enjoyed with my parents, my childish affections and carefree, irresponsible existence in a gentle and affectionate ambience. But my interest is reserved for the steps that I took in my life towards self-realization. All the pleasant points of repose, islands of happiness, paradises whose magic was not unknown to me can remain, as far as I am concerned, in the enchanted distance; for it is not a world that I have any particular desire to re-enter. — Hermann Hesse

How foolish it is to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence. — Hermann Hesse

Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves. — Hermann Hesse

It was this very thing, it seemed to him now, which had been his sickness before: that he was not able to love anybody or anything. Siddhartha — Hermann Hesse

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

Knulp was right in doing what his nature demanded and what few others could do, in speaking to strangers like a child and winning their hearts, in saying pleasant things to ladies of all ages, and making Sundays out of weekdays. — Hermann Hesse

To identify the causes, so it seemed to him, is the very essence of thinking, and by this alone sensations turn into realizations and are not lost, but become entities and start to emit like rays of light what is inside of them. — Hermann Hesse

Everything I had so far experienced was mere chance ... my life still lacked a deep individual meaning of its own — Hermann Hesse

How exhausting all this was. In fact, if only people knew how madly tiresome it is to be a criminal ... ! — Hermann Hesse

For mountain and stream, tree and leaf, root and blossom, every form in nature is echoed in us and originates in the soul whose being is eternity and is hidden from us but none the less gives itself to us for the most part in the power of love and creation. — Hermann Hesse

You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them! — Hermann Hesse

By degrees, however, he fashioned for himself out of this tendency a philosophy that was actually serviceable to life. He gained strength through familiarity with the thought that the emergency exit stood always open, and became curious, too, to taste his suffering to the dregs. If it went too badly with him he could feel sometimes with a grim malicious pleasure: 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

Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence. — Hermann Hesse

The world was beautiful, the world was particolored, strange and quizzical ... Meaning and essence were not somewhere behind things, they were inside things, in everything. — Hermann Hesse

It would be better for our country and the world in general, if at least the few people who were capable of thought stood for reason and the love of peace instead of heading wildly with blind obsession for new war. — Hermann Hesse

Perhaps that you're searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don't find the time for finding?" "How come? — Hermann Hesse

Every day new souls kept springing up [within me] beside the host of old ones, making clamorous demands and creating confusion; and now I saw as clearly as in a picture what an illusion my former personality had been. The few capacities and pursuits in which I happened to be strong had occupied all my attention, and I had painted a picture of myself as a person who was in fact nothing more than a most refined and educated specialist in poetry, music and philosophy; and as such I had lived, leaving all the rest of me to be a chaos of potentialities, instincts and impulses which I found an encumbrance and gave the label of Steppenwolf. — Hermann Hesse

When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane. — Hermann Hesse

A goal stood before Siddhartha, a single goal: to become empty, empty of thirst, empty of wishing, empty of dreams, empty of joy and sorrow. Dead to himself, not to be a self any more, to find tranquility with an emptied heard, to be open to miracles in unselfish thoughts, that was his goal. Once all of my 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 my self, the great secret. — Hermann Hesse

You see, King, we have a legend - I used to believe that it was all fairy-tale rubbish and empty smoke. It is a legend about how such things as war and death and despair were common in our country at one time. These terrible words, which we have long since stopped using in our language, can be read in collections of our old tales, and they sound awful to us and even a little ridiculous. Today I've learned that these tales are all true ... But now tell me, don't you have in your soul a sort of intimation that you're not doing the right thing? Don't you have a yearning for bright, serene gods, for sensible and cheerful leaders and mentors? Don't you ever dream in your sleep about another, more beautiful life where nobody is envious of others, where reason and order prevails, where people treat other people only with cheerfulness and considerations? — Hermann Hesse

But I am so voluntarily, and therefore I am not destitute. — Hermann Hesse

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

The town in which ... I had spent my youth ... had nothing to give me but memories. — Hermann Hesse

Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old brittle husk. — Hermann Hesse

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

I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back. — Hermann Hesse

It took me many years to lose my spirit, to unlearn thinking and forget the unity. Isn't it just as if I had turned about slowly and was on a long detour from being a man to being a child, from a thinker to a childlike person? And yet, this path has been very good, and the bird in my chest has not died. But what a path this has been! I had to pass through so much stupidity, so many vices, so many errors, so much disgust, so many disappointments and woes just to begin again. But it was fitting this way; my heart says "Yes" to it and my eyes smile at it. I've had to experience despair. I've had to descend to the most foolish of all thoughts
the thought of suicide
in order to be able to experience divine grace, to hear "Om" again, to be able to sleep and awaken properly again [ ... ] Where else might my path lead me? This path is foolish; it moves in loops, and perhaps it is going around in a circle. Let it go where it likes; I want to follow it. — Hermann Hesse

These records, however much or however little of real life may lie at the back of them, are not
an attempt to disguise or to palliate this widespread sickness of our times. They are an attempt to
present the sickness itself in its actual manifestation. They mean, literally, a journey through hell,
a sometimes fearful, sometimes courageous journey through the chaos of a world whose souls
dwell in darkness, a journey undertaken with the determination to go through hell from one end
to the other, to give battle to chaos, and to suffer torture to the full. — Hermann Hesse

You show the world as a complete, unbroken chain, an eternal chain, linked together by cause and effect. — Hermann Hesse

To thoroughly understand the world, to explain it, to despise it, may be the thing great thinkers do. But I'm only interested in being able to love the world, not to despise it, not to hate it and me, to be able to look upon it and me and all beings with love and admiration and great respect. — Hermann Hesse

Eternally revolving wheel of avidity and suffering; — Hermann Hesse

The river taught us how to listen with a silent heart, with a waiting open soul ... — Hermann Hesse

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

It was the first rent in the holy image of my father, it was the first fissure in the columns that had upheld my childhood, which every individual must destroy before he can become himself. — Hermann Hesse

Well, there's another set forward, you see. Up to now you couldn't stand all this dance and jazz music. It was too superficial and frivolous for you. Now you have seen that there's no need to take it seriously and that it can all the same be very agreeable and delightful. And by the way, the whole orchestra would be nothing without Pablo. He conducts it and puts fire into it. — Hermann Hesse

It was shameless how life made fun of one; it was a joke, a cause for weeping! Either one lived and let one's senses play, drank full at the primitive mother's breast - which brought great bliss but was no protection against death; then one lived like a mushroom in the forest, colorful today and rotten tomorrow. Or else one put up a defense, imprisoned oneself for work and tried to build a monument to the fleeting passage of life - then one renounced life, was nothing but a tool; one enlisted in the service of that which endured, but one dried up in the process and lost one's freedom, scope, lust for life...
Ach, life made sense only if one achieved both, only if it was not split by this brittle alternative! To create, without sacrificing one's senses for it. To live, without renouncing the mobility of creating. Was that impossible? — Hermann Hesse

The realms of day and night. Two different worlds coming from two opposite poles mingled during this time. — Hermann Hesse

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

Now, he thought, since all these most easily perishing things have slipped from me again, now I'm standing here under the sun again just as I have been standing here a little child, nothing is mine, I have no abilities, there is nothing I could bring about, I have learned nothing. How wondrous is this! Now, that I'm no longer young, that my hair is already half gray, that my strength is fading, now I'm starting again at the beginning and as a child! Again, he had to smile. Yes, his fate had been strange! Things were going downhill with him, and now he was again facing the world void and naked and stupid. But he could not feel sad about this, no, he even felt a great urge to laugh, to laugh about himself, to laugh about this strange, foolish world. — Hermann Hesse

How deaf and stupid I have been, he thought, walking on quickly. When anyone reads anything which he wishes to study, he does not despise the letters and punctuation marks, and call them illusion, chance and worthless shells, but he reads them, he studies and loves them, letter by letter. But I, who wished to read the book of the world and of my own nature, did presume to despise the letters and signs. I called the world of appearances, illusion. I called my eyes and tongue, chance. Now it is over; I have awakened. — Hermann Hesse

I understood it all. I understood Pablo. I understood Mozart, and somewhere behind me I heard his ghastly laughter. I knew that all the hundred thousand pieces of life's game were in my pocket. A glimpse of its meaning had stirred my reason and I was determined to begin the game afresh. I would sample its tortures once more and shudder again at its senselessness. I would traverse not once more, but often, the hell of my inner being. — Hermann Hesse

To nobody can you communicate in words and teachings, what happened to you in your hour of enlightenment. — Hermann Hesse

This little theater of mine has as many doors into as many boxes as you please, ten or a hundred thousand, and behind each door exactly what you seek awaits you. It is a pretty cabinet of pictures, my dear friend; but it would be quite useless to go through it as you are. You would be checked and blinded by it at every turn by what you are pleased to call your personality. 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

We marked men were not at all worried about the shape the future would take. — Hermann Hesse

For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity. — Hermann Hesse

Om is the bow, the arrow is soul, — Hermann Hesse

Look," he said, "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. For you to learn that about yourself is the potential reason for your having met me. — Hermann Hesse

One cannot apologize for something fundamental, and a child feels and knows this as well and as deeply as any sage. — Hermann Hesse

These rules, the sign language and grammar of the Game, constitute a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts, but especially mathematics and music (and/or musicology), and capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines. The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colours on his palette. — Hermann Hesse

On a strange and devious way, Siddhartha had gotten into this final and most base of all dependencies, by means of the game of dice. It was since that time, when he had stopped being a Samana in his heart, that Siddhartha began to play the game for money and precious things, which he at other times only joined with a smile and casually as a custom of the childlike people, with an increasing rage and passion. He was a feared gambler, few dared to take him on, so high and audacious were his stakes. He played the game due to a pain of his heart, losing and wasting his wretched money in the game brought him an angry joy, in no other way he could demonstrate his disdain for wealth, the merchants' false god, more clearly and more mockingly. — Hermann Hesse

They knew a tremendous number of things - But was it worthwhile knowing all these things if they did not know the one important thing, the only important thing? — Hermann Hesse

The old buzzard told me his life's story. I only remember that it was interesting and unusual; I've forgotten all the details. — Hermann Hesse

I thought of nothing but her. I expected everything from her. I was ready to lay everything at her feet. I was not in the least in love with her. Yet I had only to imagine that she might fail to keep the appointment, or forget it, to see where I stood. Then the world would be a desert once more, one day as dreary and worthless as the last, and the deathly stillness and wretchedness would surround me once more on all sides with no way out from this hell of silence except the razor. — Hermann Hesse

I, also, would like to look and smile, sit and walk like that, so free, so worthy, so restrained, so candid, so childlike and mysterious. A man only looks and walks like that when he has conquered his Self. I also will conquer my Self. — Hermann Hesse

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

Siddhartha had started to cultivate the seed of discontent within himself. He had started to feel like his father's love, his mother's love, and the love of his friend Govinda wouldn't make him happy forever, woudn't bring him peace, satisfy him, and be sufficient for all time. He had started to suspect that his illustrious father, his other teachers, and the wise Brahmins had shared the majority and the best of their wisdom with him, that they had already poured their all into his ready vessel without filling the vessel: the mind wasn't satisfied, the soul wasn't quiet, the heart wasn't stilled. — Hermann Hesse

It is good," he thought "to taste for yourself everything you need to know. That worldly pleasures and wealth are not good things, I learned even as a child. I knew it for a long time, but only now have I experienced it. And now I know it, I know it not only because I remember hearing it, but with my eyes, with my heart, with my stomach. And it is good for me to know it! — Hermann Hesse

The realization that my problem was one that concerned all men, a problem of living and thinking, suddenly swept over me and I was overwhelmed by fear and respect as I suddenly saw and felt how deeply my own personal life and opinions were immersed in the eternal stream of great ideas. Though it offered some confirmation and gratification, the realization was not really a joyful one. It was hard and had a harsh taste because it implied responsibility and no longer being allowed to be a child; it meant standing on one's own feet. — Hermann Hesse

In this hour, Siddhartha stopped fighting his fate, stopped suffering. On his face flourished the cheerfulness of a knowledge, which is no longer opposed by any will, which knows perfection, which is in agreement with the flow of events, with the current of life, full of sympathy for the pain of others, full of sympathy for the pleasure of others, devoted to the flow, belonging to the oneness. — Hermann Hesse

What is the world doing? Have new gods been discovered, new laws, new freedoms? Who cares! But up here a primrose is blossoming and bearing silver fuzz on its leaves, and the light sweet wind is singing below me in the poplars, and between my eyes and heaven a dark golden bee is hovering and humming - I care about that. It is humming the song of happiness, humming the song of eternity. Its song is my history of the world. — Hermann Hesse

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

Slowly blossomed, slowly ripened in Siddhartha the realisation, the knowledge, what wisdom actually was, what the goal of his long search was. It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, an ability, a secret art, to think every moment, while living his life, the thought of oneness, to be able to feel and inhale the oneness. — Hermann Hesse

In his youth when he was poor and had difficulty in earning his bread, he preferred to go hungry and in torn clothes rather than endanger his narrow limit of independence. He never sold himself for money or an easy life or to women or to those in power; and had thrown away a hundred times what in the worlds eyes was his advantage and happiness in order to safeguard his liberty. No prospect was more hateful and distasteful to him than that he should have to go to an office and conform to daily and yearly routine and obey others. — Hermann Hesse

He had too much to think about. In the course of his long, useless marches he had sunk deeper and deeper into the tangle of his botched life as into a clump of brambles, and still he had found no meaning or consolation. — Hermann Hesse

All men of goodwill have this in common - that our works put us to shame. — Hermann Hesse

There is good and reason in us ... with whom fortune plays, and we can be stronger than ... fate, if only for a few hours. ... we can draw closer to one another in times of need, understand and love one another, and live to comfort each other. — Hermann Hesse