Hermann Hesse: Trending quotes

“If we accept a home of our own making”

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p. 154

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

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

“From that hour Siddhartha ceased to fight against his destiny. There shone in his face the serenity of knowledge, of one who is no longer confronted with conflict of desires, who has found salvation, who is in harmony with the stream of events, with the stream of life, full of sympathy and compassion, surrendering himself to the stream, belonging to the unity of all things.”

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p. 59

Hermann Hesse

Source: Siddhartha (1922), p. 94

“The lone wolf who knows no peace, these victims of unceasing pain to whom the urge for tragedy has been denied and who can never break through the starry space, who feel themselves summoned thither and yet cannot survive in its atmosphere-for them is reserved, provided suffering has made their spirits rough and elastic enough, a way of reconcilement and an escape into humor. Humor has always something bourgeois in it, although the true bourgeois in capable of understanding it.”

“Love does not entreat; or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract.”

Steppenwolf (1927)

“Out whole civilization was a cemetery where Jesus Christ and Socrates, Mozart and Haydn, Dante and Goethe were but indecipherable names on moldering stones; and the mourners who stood round affecting a pretense of sorrow would give much to believe in these inscriptions which once were holy, or at least to utter one heart-felt word of grief and despair about this world that is no more. And nothing was left them but the embarrassed grimaces of a company round a grave.”

Source: Demian (1919), p. 94

“When Siddhartha listened attentively to this river, to the song of a thousand voices; when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity; then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om — perfection.”

Steppenwolf (1927)

Hermann Hesse

Source: Siddhartha (1922), p. 94

“Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.”

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

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p. 22

“Siddhartha … had begun to suspect that his worthy father and his other teachers, the wise Brahmins, had already passed on to him the bulk and best of their wisdom, that they had already poured the sum total of their knowledge into his waiting vessel; and the vessel was not full, his intellect was not satisfied.”

Demian (1919)
Variant: I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?

Hermann Hesse

H. Rosner, trans. (Bantam: 1971), p. 5
Siddhartha (1922)

“Abraxas was the god who was both god and devil.”

“How mysterious this life was, how deep and muddy its waters ran, yet how clear and noble what emerged from them.”

Source: Demian (1919), p. 168

Hermann Hesse book Narcissus and Goldmund

Narcissus and Goldmund (1930)

“Then came those years in which I was forced to recognize the existence of a drive within me that had to make itself small and hide from the world of light. The slowly awakening sense of my own sexuality overcame me, as it does every person, like an enemy and terrorist, as something forbidden, tempting, and sinful. What my curiosity sought, what dreams, lust and fear created — the great secret of puberty — did not fit at all into my sheltered childhood. I behaved like everyone else. I led the double life of a child who is no longer a child. My conscious self lived within the familiar and sanctioned world; it denied the new world that dawned within me. Side by side with this I lived in a world of dreams, drives and desires of a chthonic nature, across which my conscious self desperately built its fragile bridges, for the childhood world within me was falling apart. Like most parents, mine were no help with the new problems of puberty, to which no reference was ever made. All they did was take endless trouble in supporting my hopeless attempts to deny reality and to continue dwelling in a childhood world that was becoming more and more unreal. I have no idea whether parents can be of help, and I do not blame mine. It was my own affair to come to terms with myself and to find my own way, and like most well-brought-up children, I managed it badly.”

“So be it, heart: bid farewell without end.”

Source: Demian (1919), p. 135

“Man is not by any means of fixed and enduring form (this, in spite of suspicious to the contrary on the part of their wise men, was the ideal of the ancients). He is much more an experiment and a transition. He is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit. His innermost destiny drives him on to the spirit and to God. His innermost longing draws him back to nature, and the mother. Between the two forces his life hangs tremulous and resolute.”

Source: The Glass Bead Game (1943), p. 444

“Young people have many pleasures and many sorrows, because they only have themselves to think of, so every wish and every notion assume importance; every pleasure is tasted to the full, but also every sorrow, and many who find that their wishes cannot be fulfilled, immediately put an end to their lives.”

Steppenwolf (1927)

Hermann Hesse book Gertrud

Source: Gertrude (1910), p. 32

“I sped through heaven and saw god at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defences and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart.”

“Familiar habit makes for indolence.”

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p. 30

“Even the hour of our death may send”

The Glass Bead Game (1943)