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Hermann Hesse Quotes

Total quotes: 16
“When we hate someone, what we hate is something in him, or in our image of him, that is part of ourselves. Nothing that isn't in us ever bothers us.”
— Hermann Hesse, Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth
Tagged: Oneness, What We Hate When We Hate, Why We Hate, Why Do People Hate?
“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.”
— Hermann Hesse, Demian: The Story of a Youth
Tagged: Hate, Hate People, hating, hating yourself, hating others means hating yourself
“I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I’m beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn’t pleasant, it’s not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.”
— Hermann Hesse, Demian. Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend
Tagged: Reality, Humility, Honesty, Truth
“I have always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions.”
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Tagged: Knowledge, thirst for knowledge, Wisdom, Learning, eagerness in learning, full of questions
“Oh, love isn’t there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.”
— Hermann Hesse, Peter Camenzind: A Novel
Tagged: Love, Pain, Enduring Pain
“Every dream is supplanted by a new one, and you can't try to hold tight to any of them.”
— Hermann Hesse, Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth
Tagged: Dreams, Truth Shedding
“All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?”
— Hermann Hesse, Demian
“At the time I thought I had reached an island of peace, but it was always the same — no sooner had I gotten used to a situation, no sooner had a dream helped me a little, then it too shriveled and went blind.”
— Hermann Hesse, Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth
Tagged: Gone, It Changes, Truth Shedding
“Your soul has fallen to bits and pieces. Good. Rearrange them to suit yourself.”
— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
Tagged: Pain, Heartache, Sadness, Starting Over, Moving On
“Some of us think that holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it’s letting go.”
— Hermann Hesse, Wild Awakening: 9 Questions That Saved My Life
Tagged: Tough Love, Letting Go, Holding On
“Ideas, images, or wishes rose up in me and pulled me away from the outside world, to the point where my relationship with these pictures inside me, these dreams and shadows, were truer and more vital than those I had with my true surroundings.”
— Hermann Hesse, Demian
Tagged: Lines Fade, Reality, Boundary Breaks, Imagined Maden, Not (Yet) Real, Lies as Truth, The Beatrice Effect
“Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else. Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Tagged: Wisdom, wisdom cannot be imparted, Knowledge, Communication, imparting wisdom, wonders of wisdom, teaching wisdom, communicating wisdom, Teaching, imparting
“Your soul is the whole world.”
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Tagged: Soul, Self-Discovery, unique
“At the first kiss I felt something melt inside me that hurt in an exquisite way. All my longings, all my dreams and sweet anguish, all the secrets that slept deep within me came awake, everything was transformed and enchanted, everything made sense.”
— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
Tagged: hermann hesse, Love, Kiss You
“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farm boy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
— Hermann Hesse, Bäume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness
“So she thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it. She taught him that after a celebration of love the lovers should not part without admiring each other, without being conquered or having conquered, so that neither is bleak or glutted or has the bad feeling of being used or misused.”
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Tagged: Intimacy, Pleasure, touches
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