Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Hermann Hesse (Swiss Novelist, Poet)

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

One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Home

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

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

Happiness is a how; not a what. A talent, not an object.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Talent

Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Serenity

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

Only Love conceives things worthy enough to stand greater than individual accomplishment.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Accomplishment

Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.
—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

All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Accomplishment, Ideal, Achieving, Ideals

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

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

Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Eternity

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

Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Conversation, Speech

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Books

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

Happiness is a how, not a what: a talent, not an object
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Happiness

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

Love is stronger than violence.
—Hermann Hesse
Topics: Love, Violence

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

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, Historians

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 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

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

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

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 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

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