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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Albert Einstein German-born Theoretical Physicist
- Johann Kaspar Lavater Swiss Theologian, Poet
- Jean Antoine Petit-Senn Swiss Poet
- Berthold Auerbach German Novelist
- Ludwig Mies van der Rohe German-born American Architect
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau French Philosopher
- Carl Gustav Jung Swiss Psychologist
- Alberto Giacometti Swiss Sculptor, Painter
- Marlene Dietrich German-American Actress, Singer
- Charles Proteus Steinmetz German-born American Mathematician
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