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Hermann Hesse citations
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Hermann Hesse est un romancier, poète, peintre et essayiste allemand puis suisse. Il a obtenu le prix Goethe, le prix Bauernfeld en 1905 et le prix Nobel de littérature en 1946.

✵ 2. juillet 1877 – 9. août 1962
Hermann Hesse photo
Hermann Hesse: 175 citations0 J'aime

Hermann Hesse citations célèbres

“Le bourgeois, de par sa nature, est un être doué d’une faible vitalité, craintif, effrayé de tout abandon, facile à gouverner. C’est pourquoi, à la place de la puissance, il a mis la majorité; à la place de la force, la loi; à la place de la responsabilité, le droit de vote.”

Hermann Hesse livre Le Loup des steppes

Le Loup des steppes (Der Steppenwolf, 1927)

“Voilà longtemps que nous avons perdu le paradis, et le paradis nouveau dont nous rêvons, ou que nous voulons édifier, ne se trouvera pas sur l’équateur ni au bord des mers chaudes d’Orient : il est en nous et dans notre avenir d’hommes du Nord.”

Hermann Hesse

Propos rapportés

“On ne peut vivre intensément qu’aux dépens du moi.”

Hermann Hesse

, 1927)

“Toute l’histoire du monde ne me paraît souvent rien d’autre qu’un livre d’images reflétant le désir le plus violent et le plus aveugle des hommes : le désir d’oublier.”

Hermann Hesse livre Le Voyage en Orient

Le Voyage en Orient (', 1932)

“Il est certain que deux peuples et deux langues ne communiqueront jamais ensemble avec autant de compréhension et d'intimité que deux individus qui ont en commun la nation et le langage. Mais ce n'est pas une raison pour renoncer à se comprendre et à refuser le dialogue. Entre personnes d'un même peuple et d'une même langue, il existe aussi des barrières qui empêchent une parfaite communication et une pleine compréhension réciproque : les barrières de la culture, de l'éducation, du talent, de l'individualité. On peut affirmer que tout homme sur terre peut en principe exprimer ses idées à n'importe quel autre, et l'on peut prétendre qu'il n'y a pas deux êtres au monde à qui il soit possible de communiquer entre eux et de se comprendre vraiment, totalement, intimement : les deux thèses sont aussi vraies l'une que l'autre.”

Hermann Hesse

, 1943)

“L'histoire universelle, c'était l'interminable récit, sans esprit ni ressort dramatique, de la violence faite au plus faible par le plus fort. Et vouloir établir une relation entre l'histoire véritable, réelle, l'histoire intemporelle de l'esprit et cette rixe stupide et vieille comme le monde d'ambitieux en quête du pouvoir et d'arrivistes avides d'une place au soleil, ou vouloir l'expliquer par celle-ci, c'était vraiment déjà trahir l'esprit.”

Hermann Hesse

, 1943)

“L'histoire nous a fait l'effet d'une scène où les instincts et le goût du jour, la cupidité, l'amour de l'argent, de la puissance et du meurtre se donnent libre cours, l'effet d'un étalage de violence, de destructions et de guerre, de ministres ambitieux, de généraux vendus, de villes canonnées […] Et surtout nous perdons de vue que nous sommes nous-mêmes un fragment de l'histoire, le fruit d'une évolution, condamné à périr lui aussi, s'il perd ses capacités de développement ultérieur et de métamorphose. Nous sommes nous-mêmes de l'histoire, nous partageons la responsabilité de l'histoire universelle et de la position que nous y occupons.”

Hermann Hesse livre Le Jeu des perles de verre

Le Jeu des perles de verre (Das Glasperlenspiel, 1943)

Hermann Hesse: Citations en anglais

“Without really wanting to at all, they pay calls and carry on conversations, sit out their hours at desks and on office chairs; and it is all compulsory, mechanical and against the grain, and it could all be done or left undone just as well by machines; and indeed the never ending machinery that prevents their being, like me, the critics of their own lives and recognizing the stupidity and shallowness, the hopeless tragedy and waste of the lives they lead, and the awful ambiguity grinning over it all. And they are right, right a thousand times to live as they do, playing their games and pursuing their business, instead of resisting the dreary machine and staring into the void as I do, who have left the track.”

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Hermann Hesse livre Le Loup des steppes

Steppenwolf (1927)

“For guarding us and helping us to live.”

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Hermann Hesse livre Le Jeu des perles de verre

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

“In the German spirit the matriarchal link with nature rules in the form of the hegemony of music to an extent unknown in any other people.”

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Hermann Hesse livre Le Loup des steppes

Steppenwolf (1927)

“They knew a tremendous number of things — But was it worthwhile knowing all these things if they did not know the one important thing, the only important thing?”

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Hermann Hesse

Source: Siddhartha (1922), p. 21

“Haller’s sickness of soul, as I now know, is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs, a sickness, it seems, that by no means attacks the weak and worthless only but rather those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts.”

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Hermann Hesse livre Le Loup des steppes

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p. 21

“I was given the freedom to discover my own inclination and talents, to fashion my inmost pleasures and sorrows myself and to regard the future not as an alien higher power but as the hope and product of my own strength.”

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Hermann Hesse livre Gertrud

Source: Gertrude (1910), p. 4

“Since life may summon us at every age”

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Hermann Hesse livre Le Jeu des perles de verre

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

“A true seeker could not accept any teachings, not if he sincerely wished to find something. But he who had found, could give his approval to every path, every goal; nothing separated him from all of the other thousands who lived in eternity, who breathed the Divine.”

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Hermann Hesse

Source: Siddhartha (1922), p. 80

“That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged — to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony.”

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Hermann Hesse livre Gertrud

Gertrude (1910)

“Without a mother, one cannot love. Without a mother, one cannot die.”

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Hermann Hesse livre Narcissus and Goldmund

Narcissus and Goldmund (1930)

“So every virtue, so our grasp of truth”

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Hermann Hesse livre Le Jeu des perles de verre

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

“Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One's born at once one is guilty.”

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Hermann Hesse livre Le Loup des steppes

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p. 206, Mozart

“There were entertaining, impassioned, or witty lectures on Goethe, say, in which he would be depicted descending from a post chaise wearing a blue frock-coat to seduce some Strassburg or Wetzlar girl; or on Arabic culture; in all of them a number of fashionable phrases were shaken up like dice in a cup and everyone was delighted if he dimly recognized one or two catchwords.”

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Hermann Hesse livre Le Jeu des perles de verre

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

“There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge — that is everywhere, that is Atman, that is in me and you and in every creature, and I am beginning to believe that this knowledge has no worse enemy than the man of knowledge, than learning.”

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Hermann Hesse

Source: Siddhartha (1922), p. 29
Variant translation: I am beginning to believe that this knowledge has no worse enemy than the desire to know learning.

“That's the way it is when you love. It makes you suffer, and I have suffered much in the years since. But it matters little that you suffer, so long as you feel alive with a sense of the close bond that connects all living things, so long as love does not die!”

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Hermann Hesse livre Peter Camenzind

Peter Camenzind (1904)

“Ordinarily, when he thought back upon those days, let alone upon his student years and the Bamboo Grove, it had always been as if he were gazing from a cool, dull room out into broad, brightly sunlit landscapes, into the irrevocable past, the paradise of memory. Such recollections had always been, even when they were free of sadness, a vision of things remote and different, separated from the prosaic present by a mysterious festiveness.”

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Hermann Hesse livre Le Jeu des perles de verre

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

“I had grown a thin mustache, I was a full-grown man, and yet I was completely helpless and without a goal in life.”

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Hermann Hesse livre Demian

Source: Demian (1919), p. 169

“The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been given back to me today by this friend of mine who taught me dancing.”

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Hermann Hesse livre Le Loup des steppes

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p. 154

“As every flower fades and as all youth”

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Hermann Hesse livre Le Jeu des perles de verre

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

“Within Siddhartha there slowly grew and ripened the knowledge of what wisdom really was and the goal of his long seeking. It was nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling, and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.”

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Hermann Hesse

Siddhartha (1922)

“All existence seemed to be based on duality, on contrast. Either one was a man or one was a woman, either a wanderer or sedentary burgher, either a thinking person or a feeling person-no one could breathe in at the same time as he breathed out, be a man as well as a woman, experience freedom as well as order, combine instinct and mind. One always had to pay for one with the loss of the other, and one thing was always just as important and desirable as the other.”

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Hermann Hesse livre Narcissus and Goldmund

Narcissus and Goldmund (1930)

“Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor”

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Hermann Hesse livre Le Jeu des perles de verre

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

“Sadness when there should be Joy, hatred when there should be love show compassion because we can be more because we both have scars and pain that no one will ever understand but us so be with me not against me and bring us where we were happy and free.”

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Hermann Hesse livre Peter Camenzind

Peter Camenzind (1904)

“No, I'm not religious I'm sorry to say. There is no time now to be religious.”

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Hermann Hesse livre Le Loup des steppes

Steppenwolf (1927)

“When an orchestra of the Journeyers first publicly performed a suite from the time before Handel completely without crescendi and diminuendi, with the naïveté and chasteness of another age and world, some among the audience are said to have been totally uncomprehending, but others listened with fresh attention and had the impression that they were hearing music for the first time in their lives. In the League's concert hall between Bremgarten and Morbio, one member built a Bach organ as perfectly as Johann Sebastian Bach would have had it built had he had the means and opportunity.”

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Hermann Hesse livre Le Jeu des perles de verre

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

“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.”

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Hermann Hesse livre Peter Camenzind

Variant translation: In the beginning was the myth. Just as the great god composed and struggled for expression in the souls of the Indians, the Greeks and Germanic peoples, so to it continues to compose daily in the soul of every child.
Peter Camenzind (1904)

“Be ready bravely and without remorse”

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Hermann Hesse livre Le Jeu des perles de verre

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

“Was that really love? I saw all these passionate people reel about and drift haphazardly as if driven by a storm, the man filled with desire today, satiated on the morrow, loving fiercely and discarding brutally, sure of no affection and happy in no love…”

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Hermann Hesse livre Gertrud

Source: Gertrude (1910), p. 88

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