1,099 Quotes by Hermann Hesse

Solitude is independence.

Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.

Whether you and I and a few others will renew the world some day remains to be seen. But within ourselves we must renew it each day.

No, I'm not religious, I'm sorry to say. But I was once and shall be again. There is no time now to be religious." "No time. Does it need time to be religious?" "Oh, yes. To be religious you must have time and, even more, independence of time. You can't be religious in earnest and at the same time live in actual things and still take them seriously, time and money and the Odéon Bar and all that.

If what matters in a person's existence is to accept the inevitable consciously, to taste the good and bad to the full and to make for oneself a more individual, unaccidental and inward destiny alongside one's external fate, then my life has been neither empty nor worthless.

One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.

All life is a breath exhaled by God. All dying is a breath inhaled by God.

madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom

There is no reality except the one contained within us.