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
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
Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.
—Hermann Hesse
There is no reality except the one contained within us.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Self-reliance, Confidence
In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Individuality
The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Humanity, Human Nature
The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Truth
Oh, love isn’t there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.”
—Hermann Hesse
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
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
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
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
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
People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Bravery
In striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose.
—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.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Fear
You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: History
If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.
—Hermann Hesse
If I know what love is, it is because of you.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Romance
Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself.
—Hermann Hesse
All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Ideal, Accomplishment, Ideals
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
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
When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.
—Hermann Hesse
The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Death, Dying
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
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
Love is stronger than violence.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Violence, Love
The truth has a million faces, but there is only one truth.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Truth
Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
—Hermann Hesse
There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge—that is everywhere.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Knowledge
Now everything changed. My childhood world was breaking apart around me. My parents eyed me with a certain embarrassment. My sisters had become strangers to me. A disenchantment falsified and blunted my usual feelings and joys: the garden lacked fragrance, the woods held no attraction for me, the world stood around me like a clearance sale of last year’s secondhand goods, insipid, all its charm gone. Books were so much paper, music a grating noise. 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
Topics: Age
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