Quotes from Hermann Hesse

It is easier to bear the worries of wandering than to find peace in your hometown, where only the sage can live in a happy house surrounded by trite troubles and daily distractions.

A tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me!... Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening...

The tree does not die, it waits.

The truth is lived, not taught.

I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray that finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.

Loneliness is the way by which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself.

One can beg, buy, be presented with and find love in the streets, but it can never be stolen.

And here is a doctrine at which you will laugh. It seems to me, Govinda, that love is the most important thing in the world.

It was still quiet in the house, and not a sound was heard from outside, either. Were it not for this silence, my reverie would probably have been disrupted by reminders of daily duties, of getting up and going to school.

The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.

The truth has a million faces, but there is only one truth.

A thousand times I was ready to regret and take back my rash statement - yet it had been the truth.

The opposite of every truth is just as true.

People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.

Love of God is not always the same as love of good.

Love can be begged, bought, or received as a gift, one can find it in the street, but one cannot steal it.

Every natural form is latent within us, originates in the soul whose essence is eternity, whose essence we cannot know but which most often intimates itself to us as the power to love and create.

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

Until 1914 I loved to travel; I often went to Italy and once spent a few months in India. Since then I have almost entirely abandoned travelling, and I have not been outside of Switzerland for over ten years.

The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment, every sin already carries grace in it.

You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves.

All the girls I had ever loved were mine. Each gave me what she alone had to give and to each I gave what she alone knew how to take.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself.