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Hermann Hesse Quotes
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Hermann Karl Hesse was a German-born poet, novelist, and painter. His best-known works include Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game, each of which explores an individual's search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Wikipedia  

✵ 2. July 1877 – 9. August 1962
Hermann Hesse photo
Hermann Hesse: 168   quotes 74   likes

Hermann Hesse Quotes

“It was my destiny to join in a great experience. Having had the good fortune to belong to the League, I was permitted to be a participant in unique journey.”

Hermann Hesse book Journey to the East

Journey to the East (1932)
Context: It was my destiny to join in a great experience. Having had the good fortune to belong to the League, I was permitted to be a participant in unique journey. What wonder it had at the time! How radiant and comet-like it seemed, and how quickly it has been forgotten and allowed to fall into disrepute. For this reason, I have decided to attempt a short description of this fabulous journey, a journey the like of which had not been attempted since the days of Hugo and mad Roland.

“There are a great many suicides to which this thought imparts a common strength.”

Hermann Hesse book Steppenwolf

Steppenwolf (1927)
Context: He gained strength through familiarity with the thought that the emergency exit stood always open and became curious, too, to taste his suffering to the dregs. If it went too badly with him he could feel sometimes with a grim malicious pleasure: “I am curious to see all the same just how much man can endure. If the limit of what is bearable is reached, I have only to open the door to escape.” There are a great many suicides to which this thought imparts a common strength.

Suicide

“The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world.”

Hermann Hesse book Demian

Source: Demian (1919), p. 166
Variant translation: The bird is struggling out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born must first destroy a world. The bird is flying to God. The name of the God is called Abraxas.
As translated by W. J. Strachan
Context: 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.

World , Way , Bird , Fight

“Our god's name is Abraxas and he is God and Satan and he contains both the luminous and the dark world.”

Hermann Hesse book Demian

Source: Demian (1919), p. 180
Context: Our god's name is Abraxas and he is God and Satan and he contains both the luminous and the dark world. Abraxas does not take exception to any of your thoughts, any of your dreams. Never forget that. But he will leave you once you've become blameless and normal. Then he will leave you and look for a different vessel in which to brew his thoughts.

God , World

“Be still, my heart, away with pain!
Though passion stirs again
In blood that now flows slowly
And leads to paths once known,
These paths you tread in vain
For youth has flown.”

Hermann Hesse book Gertrud

Source: Gertrude (1910), p. 165

Pain , Heart

“You, too, have mysteries of your own.”

Hermann Hesse book Demian

Source: Demian (1919), p. 181
Context: You, too, have mysteries of your own. I know that you must have dreams that you don't tell me. I don't want to know them. But I can tell you: live those dreams, play with them, build altars to them. It is not yet the ideal but it points in the right direction. Whether you and I and a few others will renew the world someday remains to be seen. But within ourselves we must renew it each day, otherwise we just aren't serious. Don't forget that!

“Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity.”

Hermann Hesse

Siddhartha (1922)
Context: Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Samsara and Nirvana, illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real.

Truth

“Obeying is like eating and drinking. There's nothing like it if you've been without it too long”

Hermann Hesse book Steppenwolf

Steppenwolf (1927)

Drink

“Us speeding on to fresh and newer spaces”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Speed

“Mnemonists, people with freakish memories and no other virtues, were capable of playing dazzling games, dismaying and confusing the other participants by their rapid muster of countless ideas. In the course of time such displays of virtuosity fell more and more under a strict ban, and contemplation became a highly important component of the Game. Ultimately, for the audiences at each Game it became the main thing. This was the necessary turning toward the religious spirit. What had formerly mattered was following the sequences of ideas and the whole intellectual mosaic of a Game with rapid attentiveness, practiced memory, and full understanding. But there now arose the demand for a deeper and more spiritual approach. After each symbol conjured up by the director of a Game, each player was required to perform silent, formal meditation on the content, origin, and meaning of this symbol, to call to mind intensively and organically its full purport. The members of the Order and of the Game associations brought the technique and practice of contemplation with them from their elite schools, where the art of contemplation and meditation was nurtured with the greatest care. In this way the hieroglyphs of the Game were kept from degenerating into mere empty signs.”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

People , School , Art , Way

“Your faith has found no more air to breathe. And suffocation is a hard death.”

Hermann Hesse book Steppenwolf

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p.149

Death , Faith

“Let us say that the freedom exists, but it is limited to the one unique act of choosing the profession. Afterward all freedom is over. When he begins his studies at the university, the doctor, lawyer, or engineer is forced into an extremely rigid curriculum which ends with a series of examinations. If he passes them, he receives his license and can thereafter pursue his profession in seeming freedom. But in doing so he becomes the slave of base powers; he is dependent on success, on money, on his ambition, his hunger for fame, on whether or not people like him. He must submit to elections, must earn money, must take part in the ruthless competition of castes, families, political parties, newspapers. In return he has the freedom to become successful and well-to-do, and to be hated by the unsuccessful, or vice versa.”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Money , Hunger , Hate , People

“If we accept a home of our own making”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Home

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

Hermann Hesse book Steppenwolf

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p. 59

Soul

“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.”

Hermann Hesse book Steppenwolf

Steppenwolf (1927)

Pain , Peace , Way , Feeling

“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.”

Hermann Hesse book Demian

Source: Demian (1919), p. 94

Love

“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.”

Hermann Hesse

Source: Siddhartha (1922), p. 94

Soul , Laughter , Perfection

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

Hermann Hesse book Steppenwolf

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p. 22

Life , Age , Religion , Hell

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

Hermann Hesse book Demian

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?

“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.”

Hermann Hesse

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

Wisdom , Knowledge , Teachers , Waiting

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

Hermann Hesse book Demian

Source: Demian (1919), p. 168

God

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

Hermann Hesse book Narcissus and Goldmund

Narcissus and Goldmund (1930)

Life , Water

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

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

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

Heart

“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.”

Hermann Hesse book Steppenwolf

Steppenwolf (1927)

Life , Men , God , Nature

“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.”

Hermann Hesse book Gertrud

Source: Gertrude (1910), p. 32

People , Pleasure , Thinking

“Familiar habit makes for indolence.”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

“Even the hour of our death may send”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Death

“One thing, however, did become clear to him [Goldmund] – why so many perfect works of art did not please him at all, why they were almost hateful and boring to him, in spite of a certain undeniable beauty. Workshops, churches, and palaces were full of these fatal works of art; he had even helped with a few himself. They were deeply disappointing because they aroused the desire for the highest and did not fulfill it. They lacked the most essential thing – mystery. That was what dreams and truly great works of art had in common: mystery.”

Hermann Hesse book Narcissus and Goldmund

Narcissus and Goldmund (1930)

Hate , Beauty , Dreams , Art

“A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self. Now the bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be). And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he does comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire. The bourgeois is consequently by nature a creature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and easy to rule.”

Hermann Hesse book Steppenwolf

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), pp. 51-52

God , Pleasure , Fear , Nature

“Although he had reached a high stage of self-discipline and bore his last wound well, he now felt as if these ordinary people were his brothers. Their vanities, desires, and trivialities no longer seemed absurd to him; they had become understandable, lovable, and even worthy of respect.”

Hermann Hesse

Source: Siddhartha (1922), p. 90

People , Understanding

“I have never seen a man look and smile, sit and walk like that, he thought. I, also, would like to look and smile, sit and walk like that, so free, so worthy, so restrained, so candid, so childlike and mysterious. A man only looks and walks like that when he has conquered his self. I also will conquer my self.”

Hermann Hesse

H. Rosner, trans. (Bantam: 1971), p. 35
Siddhartha (1922)

Smile

“I found some consolation or narcotic. Sometimes it was a woman, sometimes a good friend — yes, you too once helped me that way — at other times it was music or applause in the theater. But now these things no longer give me pleasure and that is why I drink. I could never sing without first having a couple of drinks, but now I can also not think, talk, live and feel tolerably well without first having a couple of drinks.”

Hermann Hesse book Gertrud

Source: Gertrude (1910), p. 225

Pleasure , Music , Way , Feeling

“Each man had only one genuine vocation — to find the way to himself”

Hermann Hesse book Demian

Source: Demian (1919), p. 193

Back To Work , Way

“Blooms in its day and may not last forever.”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

“Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.”

Hermann Hesse book Peter Camenzind

Peter Camenzind (1904)

Love , Happiness

“It appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again. The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer’s voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death. And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key, calls science to aid, establishes schizomania and protects humanity from the necessity of hearing the cry of truth from the lips of these unfortunate persons.”

Hermann Hesse book Steppenwolf

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p. 58

Death , Men , Truth , Soul

“I had tasted the bait and knew that there was nothing more attractive and more subtle on earth than the Game. I had also observed fairly early that this enchanting Game demanded more than naive amateur players, that it took total possession of the man who had succumbed to its magic. And an instinct within me rebelled against my throwing all my energies and interests into this magic forever. Some naive feeling for simplicity, for wholeness and soundness, warned me against the spirit of the Waldzell Vicus Lusorum. I sensed in it a spirit of specialism and virtuosity, certainly highly cultivated, certainly richly elaborated, but nevertheless isolated from humanity and the whole of life — a spirit that had soared too high into haughty solitariness. For years I doubted and probed, until the decision had matured within me and in spite of everything I decided in favor of the Game. I did so because I had within me that urge to seek the supreme fulfillment and serve only the greatest master.”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Life , Feeling , Game , Decision

“Joseph Knecht had often noticed that many schoolmates his own age, but even more the younger boys, liked him, sought his friendship, and moreover tended to let him dominate them. They asked him for advice, put themselves under his influence. Ever since, this experience had been repeated frequently. It had its pleasant and flattering side; it satisfied ambition and strengthened self-confidence. But it also had another, a dark and terrifying side. For there was something bad and unpalatable about the attitude one took toward these schoolmates so eager for advice, guidance, and an example, about the impulse to despise them for their lack of self-reliance and dignity, and about the occasional secret temptation to make them (at least in thought) into obedient slaves.”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Friendship , Secret , Age , Confidence

“I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of desired imaginary world, some imaginary vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, to love it and be glad to belong to it. These, Govinda, are some of the thoughts in my mind.”

Hermann Hesse

Siddhartha (1922)

Love , World , Learning , Perfection

“Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads.”

Hermann Hesse book Steppenwolf

Steppenwolf (1927)

“He thought for a moment, brought back from his reflections. "It was only possible for me to do it," he said, "because it was necessary. I either had to write the book or be reduced to despair; it was the only means of saving me from nothingness, chaos and suicide. The book was written under this pressure and brought me the expected cure, simply because it was written, irrespective of whether it was good or bad. That was the only thing that counted. And while writing it, there was no need for me to think at all of any other reader but myself, or at the most, here and there another close war comrade, and I certainly never thought then about the survivors, but always about those who fell in the war. While writing it, I was as if delirious or crazy, surrounded by three or four people with mutilated bodies — that is how the book was produced."”

Hermann Hesse book Journey to the East

Journey to the East (1932)

War , People , Books , Thinking

“The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

“And life may summon us to newer races.”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Life

“These people were worthy of love and admiration in their blind loyalty, in their blind strength and tenacity. With the exception of one small thing, one tiny little thing, they lacked nothing that the sage and thinker had, and that was the consciousness of the unity of all life.”

Hermann Hesse

Source: Siddhartha (1922), p. 90

Love , Life , People , Loyalty

“Serenely let us move to distant places”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Distant

“All this, I said, just as today was the case with the beginnings of wireless, would be of no more service to man than as an escape from himself and his true aims, and a means of surrounding himself with an ever closer mesh of distractions and useless activities.”

Hermann Hesse book Steppenwolf

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p. 103

“Or else remain the slaves of permanence.”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

“You must not give way to desires which you don't believe in. I know what you desire. You should, however, either be capable of renouncing these desires or feel wholly justified in having them. Once you are able to make your request in such a way that you will be quite certain of its fulfillment, then the fulfillment will come. But at present you alternate between desire and renunciation and are afraid all the time. All that must be overcome.”

Hermann Hesse book Demian

Demian (1919)

Way , Feeling , Time

“The young people who now proposed to devote themselves to intellectual studies no longer took the term to mean attending a university and taking a nibble of this or that from the dainties offered by celebrated and loquacious professors who without authority offered them the crumbs of what had once been higher education. Now they had to study just as stringently and methodically as the engineers and technicians of the past, if not more so. They had a steep path to climb, had to purify and strengthen their minds by dint of mathematics and scholastic exercises in Aristotelian philosophy. Moreover, they had to learn to renounce all those benefits which previous generations of scholars had considered worth striving for: rapid and easy money-making, celebrity and public honors, the homage of the newspapers, marriages with daughters of bankers and industrialists, a pampered and luxurious style of life.”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Life , Money , Marriage , People