Hermann Hesse Quotes

Within you there is a stillness and sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself

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.

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.

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

When you like someone, you like them in spite of their faults. When you love someone, you love them with their faults.

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. The God's name is Abraxas.

I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference.

Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.

Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.

You have to try the impossible to achieve the possible

Every experience has its element of magic.

I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?

You must find your dream...but no dream lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular dream.

Love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is only your aversion to it that hurts, nothing else.

You are only afriad if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them!

Happiness is a how; not a what. A talent, not an object.

I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.

People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.

There is no reality except the one contained within us.

God does not send us despair in order to kill us; he sends it in order to awaken us to new life.

A tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me!... Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

If I know what love is, it is because of you.

The truth is lived, not taught.

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.

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.

I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.

When the suffering becomes acute enough, one goes forward.

Happiness is love, nothing else. A man who is capable of love is happy.

. . . gentleness is stronger than severity, water is stronger than rock, love is stronger than force.

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.

You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves.

As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.

You must find your dream, then the way becomes easy.

Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.

Solitude is independence.

Each man had only one genuine vocation to find the way to himself.

A house without books is a poor house, even if beautiful rugs are covering its floors and precious wallpapers and pictures cover its walls

Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try again and again to console my heart and pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell.

We have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.

Life is waiting everywhere, the future is flowering everywhere, but we only see a small part of it and step on much of it with our feet

Every man's story is important, eternal and sacred. That is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous and worthy of every consideration.

madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom

Not in his speech, not in his thoughts, I see his greatness, only in his actions, in his life.

Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them.

Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism.

Love must neither beg nor demand. Love must be strong enough to find certainty within itself. It then cease to be moved and becomes the mover.

I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray that finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.

The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.

What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world.