1,099 Quotes by Hermann Hesse

Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One’s born and at once one is guilty.

I am homeless, a Brahmin’s son and a samana.

What you search is not necessarily the same as what you find. When you let go of the searching, you start finding.

There are many ways in which the god can make us lonely and lead us to ourselves.

It is extremely beautiful to belong to a woman, to give yourself. Don’t laugh if I sound foolish. But to love a woman, you see, to abandon yourself to her, to absorb her completely and feel absorbed by her, that is not what you call ‘being in love,’ which you mock a little. For me it is the road to life, the way toward the meaning of life.

I shall begin my story with an experience I had when I was ten and attended our small town’s Latin school.

Alas, Siddhartha, I see you suffering, but you’re suffering a pain at which one would like to laugh, at which you’ll soon laugh for yourself.

Everyone had only one true vocation: to find himself. Let him wind up as a poet or a madman, as a prophet or a criminal – that wasn’t his business; in the long run, it was irrelevant. His business was to discover his own destiny, not just any destiny, and to live it totally and undividedly. Anything else was just a half-measure, an attempt to run away, an escape back to the ideal of the masses, an adaptation, fear of one’s own nature.

The teachers apparently regarded a dead student very differently from a living one.