Hermann Karl Hesse (1877–1962) was a German-born Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. Lyrical and confessional, his works focus on the relationship between the reflective, God-seeking individual and his fellow humans. They mirror Hesse’s interest in Eastern mysticism and spiritual values and his involvement in Jungian analysis.
Born in Calw, Württemberg, to parents who worked as Christian missionaries in India (his grandfather Hermann Gundert was a distinguished Orientalist.) Hesse grew up in a pious family circle and won a scholarship to the Maulbronn seminary. However, he soon resisted the intellectual and clerical discipline there and abandoned his scriptural pursuit. This experience features significantly in almost all his major works.
Hesse soon found employment in a bookseller and antiquary in Basle, which exposed him to German and foreign literature. He soon began to write lyric poetry, sketches, and stories. His first great novel was Peter Camenzind (1904.)
Hesse devoted himself to writing, living in Switzerland from 1911, and becoming a naturalized citizen in 1923. In 1916, he undertook Jungian analysis—an experience that had a profound effect on his subsequent work. His novel Demian (1919) broke with the romanticism of his earlier work and the thematic pattern of conflicting oppositions showed the impact of Jung’s psychology. Between 1916 and 1925, Hesse composed several of his most distinguished novellas, notably Iris (1918,) Klein and Wagner (1920,) Klingsors letzter Sommer (1920; Klingsor’s Last Summer,) and Piktors Verwandlungen (1925; Pictor’s Transformation .)
Hesse’s major works met with less success initially but got very popular with the rise of widespread interest in oriental religion, meditation, and mysticism during the 1960s and 1970s. The hagiographic Siddhartha (1922; translated 1954) is a novelistic rendering of a Brahmin’s quest for and attainment of the spiritual goal. Der Steppenwolf (1927; translated 1929) refers to the human and bestial elements in the character of the middle-aged Harry Haller and the conflict he experiences between bourgeois acceptance and spiritual self-realization.
Hesse’s longest and most famous novel, Das Glasperlenspiel (1943; The Glass Bead Game, 1949,) relates to a Utopian fantasy on the theme of withdrawal from the world and the spiritual solutions to the problems and contradictions of human nature and culture.
Hesse was awarded both the Goethe Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946. His poetry was collected in Die Gedichte (1942; Hours in the Garden and Other Poems, 1979,) and his letters, Briefe, appeared in 1951.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Hermann Hesse
All suicides have the responsibility of fighting against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be conquered by life than to fall by one’s own hand.
—Hermann Hesse
When someone is seeking, said Siddartha, “It happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. You, O worthy one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose.”
—Hermann Hesse
People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Bravery
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
Oh, love isn’t there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.”
—Hermann Hesse
If I know what love is, it is because of you.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Romance
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
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
Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and cruelties; it accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Suffering
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
Topics: Class
All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Ideals, Accomplishment, Achieving, Ideal
I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn’t. I have always found moralizing intolerable.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Music
Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Eternity
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
Topics: Humanity, Humankind
Happiness is a how; not a what. A talent, not an object.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Talent
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
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
Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Reality
For example, there is a species of butterfly, a night-moth, in which the females are much less common than the males. The moths breed exactly like all animals, the male fertilizes the female and the female lays the eggs. Now, if you take a female night moth—-many naturalists have tried this experiment—the male moths will visit this female at night and they will come from hours away. From hours away! Just think! From a distance of several miles all these males sense the only female in the region. One looks for an explanation for this phenomenon but it is not easy. You must assume that they have a sense of smell of some sort like a hunting dog that can pick up and follow a semmingly imperceptible scent. Do you see? Nature abounds with such inexplicable things. But my argument is: if the female moths were as abundant as the males, the latter would not have such a highly developed sense of smell. They’ve acquired it only because they had to train themseleves to to have it. If a person were to concentrate all his will power on a certain end, then he would achieve it. That’s all. And that also answers your question. Examine a person closely enough and you know more about him than he does himself.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Nature
Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again.
—Hermann Hesse
One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Home
Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Thought
It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Humanity
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
Topics: Wisdom
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
When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Sanity
As insanity in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizophrenia the beginning of all art, all fantasy.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Art
Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Feelings
Happiness is a how, not a what: a talent, not an object
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Happiness
Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Wisdom
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