1,099 Quotes by Hermann Hesse

In the beginning was the myth. God, in his search for self -expression, invested the souls of Hindus, Greeks, and Germans with poetic shapes and continues to invest each child ’s soul with poetry every day.

Obeying is like eating and drinking. There’s nothing like it if you’ve been without it for too long.

We fear death, we shudder at life’s instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.

Good that you ask – you should always ask, always have doubts.

Als we iemand haten dan haten we in zijn beeld iets dat in onszelf huist. Wat niet in onszelf huist, windt ons niet op.

But whereas we, in our conception, represented the will of nature to renew itself, to individualize and march forward, the others lived in the desire for the perpetuation of things as they are. For them humanity – which they loved as we did – was something complete that must be maintained and protected. For us humanity was a distant goal towards which we were marching, whose image no one yet know, whose laws were nowhere written down.

I see that you think more than you can express. But, if that’s the case, you must also know that you have never fully lived out your thoughts, and that isn’t good. Only the thoughts that we live out have any value. You knew that your ‘permissible world’ was only half the world, and you tried to hide away the second half from yourself, the way clergymen and teachers do. You won’t succeed! No one can do that when he has once begun to think.

For every true statement there is an opposite one that is also true; that language and the confines of time lead people to adhere to one fixed belief that does not account for the fullness of the truth. Because nature works in a self-sustaining cycle, every entity carries in it the potential for its opposite and so the world must always be considered complete.

That I know nothing about myself, that Siddhartha has remained thus alien and unknown to me, stems from one cause, a single cause: I was afraid of myself, I was fleeing from myself! I searched Atman, I searched Brahmin, I was willing to dissect myself and peel off all of its layers, to find the core of all peels in its unknown interior, the Atman, life, the divine part, the ultimate part. But I have lost myself in the process.