Quotes by Hermann Hesse

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Happy is he who can love much. But loving and wanting aren't the same things.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

This compassionate Idiot denies the whole of Life, all thinking and feeling, all that the world and reality mean to others. For him Reality is something entirely different than for them. Their Reality is for him a shadow: For that reason, because he sees and offers a new Reality, he becomes the enemy. [...] He has literally, once and more than once, stood on the magic borderland where everything is affirmed, where not only the remotest thought is true, but also the contrary of such thought. His innocence is not so harmless and men are rightly in awe of him.[...] He does not break the Tables of the Law, he simply turns them round and shows that the contrary to them is written on the other side.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

"Never again!" Said imperiously his will. "Again tomorrow!" Begged the heart sighing.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Already since then the feelings were those that should've remained for ever: the uncertainty of his own worth, a constant oscillating between self-esteem and dejection, between an idealism which lied above al worldly matter and a natural appetite of the senses, and now as then, even a hundred times later did I see those traits in my nature sometimes as a despicable illness, and sometimes as a sign of worth.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

On no morning of his life had he ever been in good spirits nor done any good before midday, nor ever had a happy idea, nor devised any pleasure for himself or others. By degrees during the afternoon he warmed and became alive, and only towards evening, on his good days, was he productive, active and, sometimes, aglow with joy. With this was bound up his need for loneliness and independence. There was never a man with a deeper and more passionate craving for independence than he. In his youth when he was poor and had difficulty in earning his bread, he preferred to go hungry and in torn clothes rather than endanger his narrow limit of independence. He never sold himself for money or an easy life or to women or to those in power; and had thrown away a hundred times what in the world's eyes was his advantage and happiness in order to safeguard his liberty. [...] In the beginning his dream and his happiness, in the end it was his bitter fate. The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure. He achieved his aim. He was ever more independent. He took orders from no man and ordered his ways to suit no man. Independently and alone, he decided what to do and to leave undone. For every strong man attains to that which a genuine impulse bids him seek. But in the midst of the freedom he had attained Harry suddenly became aware that his freedom was a death and that he stood alone.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Walking outside, at night, under the silent sky, along a rivulet that runs quietly, it is always something full of mistery, and moves the abyss of the soul...

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

All that is visible is expression, all nature is image, it is language and couloured hieroglyphics. Despite a very evolved science nature, we are not prepared at all, nor educated to a correct observation, we are instead on war footing.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

But 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.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Even you can mold and animate at choice the game of your life, it depends on you. As madness, in an elevated way is the beginning of every knowledge , the way schizophrenia is the beginning of all arts, of every dream.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

[...] Just slowly, among his growing riches, Siddhartha had assumed something of the childlike people's ways for himself, something of their childlikeness and of their fearfulness. And yet, he envied them, envied them just the more, the more similar he became to them. He envied them for the one thing that was missing from him and that they had, the importance they were able to attach to their lives, the amount of passion in their joys and fears, the fearful but sweet happiness of being constantly in love. These people were all of the time in love with themselves, with women, with their children, with honours or money, with plans or hopes. But he did not learn this from them, this out of all things, this joy of a child and this foolishness of a child; he learned from them out of all things the unpleasant ones, which he himself despised.