1,099 Quotes by Hermann Hesse

Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again.

The mother of life could be called love or desire; she could also be called death, grave, or decay. Eve was the mother. She was the source of bliss as well as of death; eternally she gave birth and eternally she killed; her love was fused with cruelty. The longer he carried her image within him, the more it became a parable and a sacred symbol to him. Not.

I like listening to music, but only the kind you play, absolute music, the kind that makes you feel that someone is rattling at the doors if heaven and hell. I like music very much, I think, because it’s so unconcerned with morality.

That man is not yet a finished creation but rather a challenge of the spirit; a distant possibility dreaded as much as it is desired; that the way towards it has only been covered for a short distance and with terrible agonies and ecstasies even by those few for whom it is the scaffold today and the monument tomorrow – all this the Steppenwolf, too, suspected.

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.

But it’s a poor fellow who can’t take his pleasure without asking other people’s permission.

Theory is knowledge that doesn’t work. Practice is when everything works and you don’t know why.

The mind cannot live in nature, only against nature, only as its counterpart.

A person is afraid only when he isn’t at one with himself.