Quotes from Hermann Hesse

Every healthy person must have a goal in life and that life must have content.

What is the holding of breath? It is a flight from the Self, it is a temporary escape from the torment of Self. It is a temporary palliative against the pain and folly of life.

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever will be born must destroy a world.

Remember this: one can be a strict logician or grammarian and at the same time full of imagination and music.

Love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is only your aversion to it that hurts, nothing else.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

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

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.

At that time two opposing concepts of the Game called forth commentary and discussion. The foremost players distinguished two principal types of Game, the formal and the psychological.

Was then not all sorrow in time, all self-torment and fear in time? Were not all difficulties and evil in the world conquered as soon as one conquered time, as soon as one dispelled time?

Beauty does not bring happiness to the one who possesses it, but to the one who loves and admires it.

I hope death will be a great happiness, a happiness as great as that of love, fulfilled love

Look: We hate nothing that exists, not even death, suffering and dying, does not horrify our souls, as long as we learn more deeply to love.

Often it is the most deserving people who cannot help loving those who destroy them.

He had loved and he had found himself. Most people love to lose themselves.

Love is like death. It is fulfillment and an evening after which nothing more may follow.

Happiness is love, nothing else.

The art of love-giving and taking become one.

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

It is not Kafka's fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

Making music together is the best way for two people to become friends.

You can ride, you can travel with a friend of your own; The final step you must take alone. No wisdom is better than this when known: That every hard thing is done alone.

I am much inclined to live from my rucksack, and let my trousers fray as they like.