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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: Humankind, 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 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 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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: Historians, History

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