Quotes by
Hermann Hesse |
1877-1962 , German writer, Nobel 1946
German novelist and poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. The main theme of his work is the individual’s efforts to break out of the established modes of civilization so as to find an essential spirit and identity. His best-known works include Demian (1919), Steppenwolf (1927), Siddhartha (1922), and The Glass Bead Game (1943).
His books, especially Siddhartha, gained new popularity in the late 1960s.
| 56 quotes | 2,216 visits |
Quotations
| • | You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live. 20 |
| • | The truth has a million faces, but there is only one truth. 5 |
| • | Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others. 5 |
| • | What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world. 5 |
| • | If I know what love is, it is because of you. 4 |
| • | You must find your dream, then the way becomes easy. 4 |
| • | Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. 4 |
| • | 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. 3 |
| • | Faith and doubt go hand in hand, they are complementaries. One who never doubts will never truly believe. |
| • | The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure. |
| • | Happiness is love, nothing else. A man who is capable of love is happy. |
| • | Madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom |
| • | Beauty does not bring happiness to the one who possesses it, but to the one who loves and admires it. |
| • | The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire. |
| • | Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience violates the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism. |
| • | Age is a state of mind. Youth and age exist only among the ordinary people. All the more talented and exceptional of us are sometimes old, just as we are sometimes happy, and sometimes sad. |
| • | Solitude is independence. |
| • | All life was a breath exhaled by God. All dying was a breath inhaled by God. |
| • | As a body everyone is single, as a soul never. |
| • | Theory is knowledge that doesn't work. Practice is when everything works and you don't know why. |
| • | The best weapons against the infamies of life are courage, willfulness and patience. Courage strengthens, willfulness is fun and patience provides tranquility. |
| • | Searching means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. |
| • | Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. |
| • | Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud. |
| • | Chaos demands to be recognized and experienced before letting itself be converted into a new order. |
| • | Often it is the most deserving people who cannot help loving those who destroy them. |
| • | Love of God is not always the same as love of good. |
| • | It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone. |
| • | Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves. |
| • | In eternity there is no time, only an instant long enough for a joke. |
| • | A man who is ill-adjusted to the world is always on the verge of finding himself. One who is adjusted to the world never finds himself, but gets to be a cabinet minister. |
| • | The truth is lived, not taught. |
| • | God does not send us despair in order to kill us; he sends it in order to awaken us to new life. |
| • | Love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is only your aversion to it that hurts, nothing else. |
| • | There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself. |
| • | When you like someone, you like them in spite of their faults. When you love someone, you love them with their faults. |
| • | Every experience has its element of magic. |
| • | Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go. |
| • | To achieve the possible, we must attempt the impossible again and again. |
| • | The true profession of a man is to find his way to himself. |
| • | 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. |
| • | Within you there is a stillness and sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself. |
| • | During deep meditation it is possible to dispel time, to see simultaneously all the past, present, and future, and then everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman. |
| • | Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. |
| • | Property, possessions and riches had also finally trapped him. They were no longer a game and a toy. They had become a chain and a burden. |
| • | Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goals, if he is able to think, if he is able to wait, if he is able to fast. |
| • | I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference. |
| • | 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. |
| • | The bird is struggling out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born must first destroy a world. |
| • | 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. |
| • | Only the ideas that we actually live are of any value. |
| • | I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself. |
| • | People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest. |
| • | Young people have many pleasures and many sorrows, because they only have themselves to think of, so every wish and every notion assume importance. |
| • | Oh, love isn’t there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure. |
| • | In the beginning was the myth. God, in his search for self-expression, invested the souls of Hindus, Greeks, and Germans with poetic shapes and continues to invest each child’s soul with poetry every day. |
