1,099 Quotes by Hermann Hesse

I don’t know. I really don’t know. Perhaps that would be best, I thought I wanted it myself. But today I’m no longer sure what I really want and desire. Before, everything was simple, as simple as letters in my textbook. Now nothing is simple any more, not even the letters. Everything has taken on many meanings and faces. I don’t know what will become of me, I can’t think about that now.

I wanted to say a prayer and tried hard to remember one, but all I could think of was silly phrases such as ‘Dear Sir’ and ‘Under the Circumstances’. In my sadness and confusion I mumbled those.

We can understand one another, but each of us can only interpret himself.

All men of goodwill have this in common – that our works put us to shame.

Now and then I have expressed the opinion that every nation, and every person, would do better, instead of rocking himself to sleep with political catchwords about war-guilt, to ask himself how far his own faults and negligencies and evil tendencies are guilty of the war and all the other wrongs of the world, and that there lies the only possible means of avoiding the next war.

It taught him how to listen – how to listen with a quiet heart and a waiting soul, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgment, without opinion.

In reality there was only one thing you dreaded: letting yourself fall, taking the step into uncertainty, the little step beyond all the securities that existed. And whoever had once surrendered himself, one single time, whoever had practiced the great act of confidence and entrusted himself to fate, was liberated. He no longer obeyed the laws of earth; he had fallen into space and swung along in the dance of the constellations. That was it.

Knowledge can be expressed, but not wisdom. One can discover it, one can live it, one can be borne along by it, one can do miracles with it, but one cannot express it and teach it.

Perhaps he was handsome, perhaps I liked him, perhaps I also found him repulsive, I could not be sure of that either.