1,099 Quotes by Hermann Hesse

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers.

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

But peace, too, is a living thing and like all life it must wax and wane, accommodate, withstand trials, and undergo changes.

... let us recall the well-known statement of a university professor in the Republic of the Massagetes: 'Not the faculty but His Excellency the General can properly determine the sum of two and two.'

The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer's voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death.

Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.

Happiness is a how; not a what. A talent, not an object.

Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence

Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism.