Hermann Hesse Quotes

268 Sourced Quotes

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.

Hermann Hesse
The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life.

Hermann Hesse
What is the holding of breath? It is a flight from the Self, it is a temporary escape from the torment of Self. It is a temporary palliative against the pain and folly of life.

Hermann Hesse
Each man carries the vestiges of his birth; the slime and eggshells of his primeval past with him to the end of his days. Some never become human, remaining frog, lizard, ant. Some are human above the waist, fish below.

Hermann Hesse
And what is called history at school, and all we learn by heart there about heroes and geniuses and great deeds and fine emotions, is all nothing but a swindle invented by the schoolmasters for educational reasons to keep children occupied for a given number of years. It has always been so and always will be.

Hermann Hesse
Slowly blossomed, slowly ripened in Siddhartha the realisation, the knowledge, what wisdom actually was, what the goal of his long search was. It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, an ability, a secret art, to think every moment, while living his life, the thought of oneness, to be able to feel and inhale the oneness.

Hermann Hesse
It is a pity that you students aren't fully aware of the luxury and abundance in which you live.

Hermann Hesse
Let us recall the well-known statement of a university professor in the Republic of the Massagetes: 'Not the faculty but His Excellency the General can properly determine the sum of two and two.'

Hermann Hesse
I shall begin my story with an experience I had when I was ten and attended our small town's Latin school.

Hermann Hesse
Therefore, I see whatever exists as good, death is to me like life, sin like holiness, wisdom like foolishness, everything has to be as it is, everything only requires my consent, only my willingness, my loving agreement, to be good for me, to do nothing but work for my benefit, to be unable to ever harm me.

Hermann Hesse
Everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my loving understanding; then all is well with me and nothing can harm me.

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
The world, Govinda my friend, is not imperfect, not to be seen as on a slow path toward perfection: No, it is perfect in every moment, all transgression already bears grace within itself, all little children already have the aged in themselves, all the sucklings death, all the dying eternal life.

Hermann Hesse
Remember this: one can be a strict logician or grammarian and at the same time full of imagination and music.

Hermann Hesse
The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life.

Hermann Hesse
Were not the gods forms created like me and you, mortal, transient?

Hermann Hesse
All men of goodwill have this in common - that our works put us to shame.

Hermann Hesse
It is remarkable, all that men can swallow. For a good ten minutes I read a newspaper. I allowed the spirit of an irresponsible man who chews and munches another's words in his mouth, and gives them out again undigested, to enter into me through my eyes.

Hermann Hesse
Everything that was not suffered to the end and finally concluded, recurred, and the same sorrows were undergone.

Hermann Hesse
He had thrown himself away, he had lost interest in everything, and life, falling in with his feelings, had demanded nothing of him. He had lived as an outsider, an idler and onlooker, well liked in his young manhood, alone in his illness and advancing years. Seized with weariness, he sat down on the wall, and the river murmured darkly in his thoughts.

Hermann Hesse
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.

Hermann Hesse
Among mathematicians, even in those days, the reputation of being a good Glass Bead Game player meant a great deal; it was equivalent to being a very good mathematician.

Hermann Hesse
Beautiful was this world, looking at it thus, without searching, thus simply, thus childlike.

Hermann Hesse
The world was beautiful when looked at in this way-without any seeking, so simple, so childlike.

Hermann Hesse
The bourgeois today burns as heretics and hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments tomorrow.

Hermann Hesse
Everyone gives what he has. The soldier gives strength, the merchant goods, the teacher instruction, the farmer rice, the fisherman fish.

Hermann Hesse
As every one of us knows, there are some festivals and games in which everything goes right, and every element lifts up, animates, and exalts every other, just as there are theatrical and musical performances which without any clearly discernible cause seem to ascend miraculously to glorious climaxes and intensely felt experiences, whereas others, just as well prepared, remain no more than decent tries.

Hermann Hesse
If a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do.

Hermann Hesse