Quotes by Hermann Hesse

“Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself....His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Eve...”

“And many years later, as an adult student of history, Knecht was to perceive more distinctly that history cannot come into being without the substance and the dynamism of this sinful world of egois...”

“...your tranquil yes to the changing over into the formless void of the unlimited.”

“If I know what love is, it is because of you.”

“Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.”

“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 ar...”

“Often it is the most deserving people who cannot help loving those who destroy them.”

“It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to b...”

“Love must not entreat,' she added, 'or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract.”

“When you like someone, you like them in spite of their faults. When you love someone, you love them with their faults.”

“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...”

“Words are really a mask,' he said. 'They rarely express the true meaning; in fact they tend to hide it. If you can live in fantasy, then you don't need religion, since with fantasy you can understa...”

“His way had therefore come full circle, or rather had taken the form of an ellipse or a spiral, following as ever no straight unbroken line, for the rectilinear belongs only to Geometry and not to ...”

“I do want more. I am not content with being happy. I was not made for it. It is not my destiny. My destiny is the opposite.”

“Once he said to her: 'You are like me; you are different from other people. You are Kamala and no one else, and within you there is a stillness and sanctuary to which you can retreat any time and b...”

“Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can - that is their secret. ”

“You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not fl...”

“Times of terror and the deepest misery may arrive, but if there is to be any happiness in this misery it can only be a spiritual happiness, related to the past in the rescue of the culture of early...”

“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 ar...”

“Thus Gotama [Buddha] walked toward the town to gather alms, and the two samanas recognized him solely by the perfection of his repose, by the calmness of his figure, in which there was no trace of ...”