1,099 Quotes by Hermann Hesse

Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can - that is their secret.

Siddhartha has one single goal-to become empty, to become empty of thirst, desire, dreams, pleasure and sorrow-to let the Self die. No longer to be Self, to experience the peace of an emptied heart, to experience pure thought-that was his goal.

When you like someone, you like them in spite of their faults. When you love someone, you love them with their faults.

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, that is Atman, that is in me and you and in every creature, and I am beginning to believe that this knowledge has no worse enemy than the man of knowledge, than learning.

I do want more. I am not content with being happy. I was not made for it. It is not my destiny. My destiny is the opposite.

Truly, nothing in the world has so occupied my thoughts as this I, this riddle, the fact I am alive, that I am separated and isolated from all others, that I am Siddhartha! And about nothing in the world do I know less about than me, about Siddhartha!

Y el artista no es, como el vulgo piensa, una persona jovial que esparce por aquí y por allá obras de arte por mera exuberancia, sino que infortunadamente es por lo general una pobre alma que se sofoca con riquezas excedentes y que por lo tanto tiene que obsequiar algunas de ellas.

I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.

You've never lived what you are thinking, and that isn't good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.