Quotes By Hermann Hesse

The truth is lived, not taught.

Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.

When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.

One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.

You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves.

I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.

All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.

Solitude is independence.

Happiness is a how; not a what. A talent, not an object.

There's no reality except the one contained within us. That's why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.

Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.

The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.

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

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

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.

In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified.

It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge - that is everywhere.

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

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.

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader.

It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is.

Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.

As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.

Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.