Hermann Hesse Quotes

My real self wanders elsewhere, far away, wanders on and on invisibly and has nothing to do with my life.

. . . gentleness is stronger than severity, water is stronger than rock, love is stronger than force.

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

Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can - that is their secret.

For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.

When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols...

You've never lived what you are thinking, and that isn't good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.

I can think. I can wait. I can fast.

When someone is seeking,” said Siddartha, “It happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. You, O worthy one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose.

Most men will not swim before they are able to.” Is that not witty? Naturally, they won't swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they wont think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.

I have always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions.

Good that you ask — you should always ask, always have doubts.

I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.

I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.

You must find your dream...but no dream lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular dream.