Quotes by Hermann Hesse

“He brooded on how close destruction always was to all creatures, animals as well as humans, and he realized that there is nothing we can predict or know for certain in this world except death.”

“One of the disadwantages of school and learning, he thought dreamily, was that the mind seemed to have the tendency too see and represent all things as though they were flat and had only two dimens...”

“Workshops, churches, and palaces were full of these fatal works of art; he had even helped with a few himself. They were deeply disappointing because they aroused the desire for the highest and did...”

“Tegularius was a willful, moody person who refused to fit into his society. Every so often he would display the liveliness of his intellect. When highly stimulated he could be entrancing; his morda...”

“Voll Blten steht der Pfirsichbaum nicht jede wchst zur Frucht sie schimmern hell wie Rosenschaum durch Blau und Wolkenflucht. Wie Blten geh'n Gedanken auf hundert an jedem Tag -- lass' blhen, lass'...”

“At that moment, when the world around him melted away, when he stood alone like a star in the heavens, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of icy despair, but he was more firmly himself than ever. That...”

“When I composed those verses I was preoccupied less with music than with an experiencean experience in which that beautiful musical allegory had shown its moral side, had become an awakening and a ...”

“Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.”

“Faith is stronger than so-called reason.”

“Man is a dubious mixture of mind and matter; since the mind unlocks recognition of the eternal to him, while matter pulls him down and binds him to the transitory, he should strive away from the se...”

“It is wrong to say that schoolmasters lack heart and are dried-up, soulless pedants! No, by no means. When a child's talent which he has sought to kindle suddenly bursts forth, when the boy puts as...”

“The mind cannot live in nature, only against nature, only as its counterpart.”

“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.”

“He read the veinings of a leaf, the pattern on a mushroom cap, and divined mysteries, relations, futures, possibilities: the magic of symbols, the foreshadowing of numbers and writing, the reductio...”

“And those of us who trust ourselves the least,Who doubt and question most, these, it may be,Will make their mark upon eternity,And youth will turn to them as to a feast.The time may come when a man...”

“I am a star in the firmamentthat observe the world, despises the worldand consumed in its heat.I am the sea by night in a stormthe sea shouting that accumulates new sinsand to the ancient makes rec...”

“You show the world as a complete, unbroken chain, an eternal chain, linked together by cause and effect.”

“Nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to follow the path that leads to himself.”

“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.”

“I called the world of phenomena an illusion, I called my eyes and my tongue and accident, valueless phenomena. No, that is all over; I have awakened, I have really awakened and have just been born ...”