1,099 Quotes by Hermann Hesse

The most lively young people become the best old people, not those who pretend to be as wise as grandfathers while they are still in school.

Vivons-nous donc, nous autres, pour nous débarrasser de la mort? Non, nous vivons pour la crandre et aussi pour l'aimer, et c'est grâce à elle que ce petit bout de vie, quelquegois, l'espace d'une heure, brûle d'une flamme si belle.

No, a true seeker, one who truly wished to find, could accept no doctrine. But the man who has found what he sought, such a man could approve of every doctrine, each and every one, every path, every goal; nothing separated him any longer from all those thousands of others who lived in the eternal, who breathed the Divine.

It was fortunate that love did not need words; or else it would be full of misunderstanding and foolishness.

I am superior to you only in one point: I'm awake, whereas you are only half awake, or completely asleep sometimes. I call a man awake who knows in his conscious reason his innermost unreasonable force, drives, and weaknesses and knows how to deal with them.

Love of God," he said slowly, searching for words, "is not alwaysthe same as love of good, I wish it were that simple. We know whatis good, it is written in the Commandments. But God is notcontained only in the Commandments, you know; they are only aninfinitesimal part of Him. A man may abide by the Commandmentsand be far from God.

I shall no longer be instructed by the Yoga Veda or the Aharva Veda, or the ascetics, or any other doctrine whatsoever. I shall learn from myself, be a pupil of myself; I shall get to know myself, the mystery of Siddhartha." He looked around as if he were seeing the world for the first time.

An enlightened man had but one duty - to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led.

Perfect music has its cause. It arises from equilibrium. Equilibrium arises from righteousness, and righteousness arises from the meaning of the cosmos. Therefore one can speak about music only with a man who has perceived the meaning of the cosmos.