1,099 Quotes by Hermann Hesse

Initially all he dreamed and wished for, eventually it became his bitter lot. Those who live for power are destroyed by power, those who live for money by money; service is the ruin of the servile, pleasure the ruin of the pleasure-seeker.

Einsamkeit ist Unabhängigkeit, ich hatte sie mir gewünscht und mir erworben in langen Jahren. Sie war kalt, o ja, sie war aber auch still, wunderbar still und groß wie der kalte stille Raum, in dem die Sterne sich drehen.

Besides-neither of us knows why you happen to be drinking wine at this moment.That which is within you and directs your life knows already. It's good to realize that within us there is someonewho knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.

جادو و «افسون» پیشینه ای اصیل در فلسفه و اندیشه های ژرف دارد

All I wanted was to try and realize whatever was in me. Why was that so difficult?

Even as a child I had had at intervals a fondness for observing strange forms in nature, not so much examining them as surrendering myself to their magic, their oblique message. Long tree-roots, coloured veins in rock, patches of oil floating on water, flaws in glass—all such things had a certain fascination for me, above all, water and fire, smoke, clouds, dust and expecially the swirling specks of colour which swam before my closed eyes.

That is the way the leaves fall round an autumn  tree; it is unaware of it, rain runs down it, it is subjected to sun or frost and life slowly retreats. It does not die. It waits.

But where we have given of our love and respect not from habit but of our own free will, where we have been children and friends from our inmost heart, it is a bitter and terrible moment when we suddenly recognize that our natural tendency is bound to lead us away from the people we love.

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.