Quotes from Hermann Hesse

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

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

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 best weapons against the infamies of life are courage, wilfulness and patience. Courage strenthens, wilfulness is fun and patience provides tranquility.

The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.

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

There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.

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.

To die is to go into the Collective Unconscious, to lose oneself in order to be transformed into form, pure form.

You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.

I was out of my bed in one second, trembling with excitement, and I dashed to the door and into the adjoining room, where I could watch the streets below from the windows.

I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.

Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try again and again to console my heart and pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell.

So you find yourself surrounded by death and horror in the world, and you escape it into lust. But lust has no duration; it leaves you again in the desert.

Either a man goes and hangs himself, and then he hangs sure enough, and he'll have his reasons for it, or else he goes on living and then he has only living to bother himself with. Simple enough.

I have no desire to walk on water," said Siddhartha. "Let the old shamans satisfy themselves with such skills".

She stood a moment before my eyes, clearly and painfully, loved and deeply woven into my destiny; then fell away again in a deep oblivion, at a half regretted distance.

You learned people and artists have, no doubt, all sorts of superior things in your heads; but you're human beings like the rest of us, and we, too, have our dreams and fancies.

Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.

Every experience has its element of magic.

I shall begin my story with an experience I had when I was ten and attended our small town's Latin school.

Faith and doubt go hand in hand, they are complementaries. One who never doubts will never truly believe.

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

It was the first rent in the holy image of my father, it was the first fissure in the columns that had upheld my childhood, which every individual must destroy before he can become himself.