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
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
People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Bravery
If I know what love is, it is because of you.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Romance
Happiness is a how, not a what: a talent, not an object
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Happiness
Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.
—Hermann Hesse
All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Ideals, Ideal, Accomplishment, Achieving
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
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
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
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
Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Eternity
The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Truth
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 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
Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Speech, Conversation
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
Love is stronger than violence.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Violence, Love
When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Sanity
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
I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Growth, Fortune
There is no reality except the one contained within us.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Self-reliance, Confidence
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
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
Only Love conceives things worthy enough to stand greater than individual accomplishment.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Accomplishment
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
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
You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation…and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Suffering
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
Solitude is independence.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: One liners, Solitude
Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Serenity
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: Dying, Death
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
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
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
Oh, love isn’t there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.”
—Hermann Hesse
Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Reality
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
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 truth has a million faces, but there is only one truth.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Truth
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