Quotes from Hermann Hesse

I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference.

Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.

Knowledge can communicated but not wisdom.

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.

Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

It was lovely, and tempting, to exert power over men and to shine before others, but power also had its perditions and perils.

It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and complement.

Romantic souvenirs had a way of attaching themselves to one when one wanted to move on, but they were not to be taken seriously.

To recognize causes is to think, and through thought alone feelings become knowledge and are not lost, but become real and begin to mature.

This happiness consisted of nothing else but the harmony of the few things around me with my own existence, a feeling of contentment and well-being that needed no changes and no intensification.

When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.

Age is a state of mind. Youth and age exist only among the ordinary people. All the more talented and exceptional of us; are sometimes old, just as we are sometimes happy, and sometimes sad.

You are only afriad if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them!

Words can not express the joy of new life.

Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.

The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.

What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world.

What for me is bliss and life and ecstasy and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in life it finds it absurd.

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

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

There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.

All life was a breath exhaled by God. All dying was a breath inhaled by God.

His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands and thousands.

Love must neither beg nor demand. Love must be strong enough to find certainty within itself. It then cease to be moved and becomes the mover.