1,099 Quotes by Hermann Hesse

If a beautiful thing were to remain beautiful for all eternity, I’d be glad, but all the same Id look at it with a colder eye. I’d say to myself: You can look at it any time, it doesn’t have to be today.

The water changed to vapour and rose, became rain and came down again, became spring, brook and river, changed a new, flowed anew.

Every man’s story is important, eternal and sacred. That is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous and worthy of every consideration.

Most people, Kamala, are like a falling leaf, which is blown and is turning around through the air, and wavers, and tumbles to the ground. But others, a few, are like stars, they go on a fixed course, no wind reaches them, in themselves they have their law and their course.

The realms of day and night. Two different worlds coming from two opposite poles mingled during this time.

But he has not killed himself, for a glimmer of belief still tells him that he is to drink this frightful suffering in his heart to the dregs, and that it is of this suffering he must die.

I saw Demian’s face and remarked that it was not a boy’s face but a man’s and then I saw, or rather became aware, that it was not really the face of a man either; it had something different about it, almost a feminine element. And for the time being his face seemed neither masculine nor childish, neither old nor young but a hundred years old, almost timeless and bearing the mark of other periods of history than our own.

To be able to throw one’s self away for the sake of a moment, to be able to sacrifice years for a woman’s smile – that is happiness.

I have become weary and distrustful of teaching and learning, and that I have little faith in words that come to us from teachers.