1,099 Quotes by Hermann Hesse

Time is not real, Govinda, I have experienced this often and often again. And if time is not real, then the gap which seems to be between the world and the eternity, between suffering and blissfulness, between evil and good, is also a deception.

A wolf of the Steppes that had lost its way and strayed into the towns and the life of the herd, a more striking image could not be found for his shy loneliness, his savagery, his restlessness, his homesickness, his homelessness.

Mathematics, as far as he was concerned, was a Sphinx charged with deceitful puzzles whose cold malicious gaze transfixed her victims, and he gave the monster a wide berth.

What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.

I live in my dreams – that’s what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That’s the difference.

The world, as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish – and it will.

Many verses of the holy books, above all the Upanishads of Sama-Veda spoke of this innermost thing. It is written: “Your soul is the whole world.” It says that when a man is asleep, he penetrates his innermost and dwells in Atman. There was wonderful wisdom in these verses; all the knowledge of the sages was told here in enchanting language, pure as honey collected by the bees.

These impulses always came from the “other world,” they were always accompanied by anxiety, compulsion, and a troubled conscience, they were always revolutionary, endangering the peace in which I would gladly have gone on living. The.

He found, moreover, that the younger and more ignorant his pupils were, the more pleasure he took in teaching.