Hermann Hesse was a German-Swiss poet and novelist. His best-known work is the novel “Demian” which he wrote under the pseudonym, Emil Sinclair. Here is a compilation of Inspirational quotes from Hermann Hesse.
Hermann Hesse was born on July 2, 1877, in the German city of Calw to a middle-class family. He attended a private school in Calw and then went to high school in Pforzheim. After graduating, he studied medicine at the University of Tübingen for three semesters and then switched to studying philosophy at Berlin University where he received his doctorate degree in 1902 with a thesis on German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s aesthetics.
“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.”
“Some of us think holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it is letting go.”
“Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.”
“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.”
“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 river has taught me to listen; you will learn from it, too. The river knows everything; one can learn everything from it. You have already learned from the river that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek the depths.”
“I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.”
“Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.”
“They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.”
“A magic dwells in each beginning, protecting us, telling us how to live…”
“Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.”
“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.”
“My goal is this: always to put myself in the place in which I am best able to serve, wherever my gifts and qualities find the best soil to grow, the widest field of action. There is no other goal.”
“Words can not express the joy of new life.”
“Happiness is a how; not a what. A talent, not an object.”
“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.”
“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.”
“One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.”
“And some day there will be nothing left of everything that has twisted my life and grieved it and filled me so often with such anguish. Some day, with the last exhaustion, peace will come and the motherly earth will gather me back home. It won’t be the end of things, only a way of being born again, a bathing and a slumbering where the old and the withered sink down, where the young and new begin to breathe. Then, with other thoughts, I will walk along streets like these, and listen to streams, and overhear what the sky says in the evening, over and over and over.”
“We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.”
“No permanence is ours, we are a wave that flows to fit whatever form it finds.”
“Within you there is a stillness and sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself”
“Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.”
“For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.”
“So you can’t dance? Not at all? Not even one step? How can you say that you’ve taken any trouble to live when you won’t even dance?”
“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 be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.”
“Passion is always a mystery and unaccountable, and unfortunately there is no doubt that life does not spare its purest children; often it is just the most deserving people who cannot help loving those that destroy them.”
“You must find your dream…but no dream lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular dream.”
“Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists of putting too high a value on time. In eternity there is no time. Eternity is a moment, just long enough for a joke”
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
“And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life.”
“Loneliness is the way by which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself.”
“Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader.”
“Whither will my path yet lead me? This path is stupid, it goes in spirals, perhaps in circles, but whichever way it goes, I will follow it.”
“I am much inclined to live from my rucksack, and let my trousers fray as they like.”
“I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.”
“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.”
“I was given the freedom to discover my own inclination and talents, to fashion my inmost pleasures and sorrows myself and to regard the future not as an alien higher power but as the hope and product of my own strength.”
“To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.”
“Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can – that is their secret.”
“You have to try the impossible to achieve the possible”
“That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony.”
“What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.”
“When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.”
“It is not for me to judge another man’s life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone.”
“Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others.”
“What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you’re searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don’t find the time for finding?”
“Good that you ask — you should always ask, always have doubts.”
“This day will never come again and anyone who fails to eat and drink and taste and smell it will never have it offered to him again in all eternity. The sun will never shine as it does today…But you must play your part and sing a song, one of your best.”
“You’ve never lived what you are thinking, and that isn’t good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.”
“Look: We hate nothing that exists, not even death, suffering and dying, does not horrify our souls, as long as we learn more deeply to love.”
“Painting is marvelous; it makes you happier and more patient. Afterwards you do not have black fingers as with writing, but blue and red ones.”
“Your soul is the whole world.”
“That’s the way it is when you love. It makes you suffer, and I have suffered much in the years since. But it matters little that you suffer, so long as you feel alive with a sense of the close bond that connects all living things, so long as love does not die!”
“Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goals if he is able to think if he is able to wait if he is able to fast.”
“Oh, love isn’t there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.”
“You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself.”
“The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been given back to me today by this friend of mine who taught me dancing.”
“I felt knowledge and the unity of the world circulate in me like my own blood.”
“I have known it for a long time but I have only just experienced it. Now I know it not only with my intellect, but with my eyes, with my heart, with my stomach.”
“How beautiful the world was when one looked at it, without searching… just looked, simply and innocently.”
“Only within yourself exists the other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already it’s being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul.”
“Each man’s life represents a road toward himself.”
“The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.”
“People know, or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the world of mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer’s slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue.”
“The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment, every sin already carries grace in it.”
“I live in my dreams that’s what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That’s the difference.”
“A mere nothing suffices and the lightning strikes.”
“Making music together is the best way for two people to become friends.”
“My real self wanders elsewhere, far away, wanders on and on invisibly, and has nothing to do with my life.”
“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, that is Atman, that is in me and you and in every creature, and I am beginning to believe that this knowledge has no worse enemy than the man of knowledge, than learning.”
“Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice, and understanding, and to fulfill their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side.”
“People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.”
“As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.”
“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.”
“The river is everywhere at the same time . . . everywhere and the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future.”
“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.”
“Every experience has its element of magic.”
“I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment, and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.”
“Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again.”
“The only reality is the one we have inside us. What makes most people’s lives so artificial and unworthy is that they falsely regard outside images as reality and they never allow their own inner world to speak.”
“There is no reality except the one contained within us.”
“To be able to throw one’s self away for the sake of a moment, to be able to sacrifice years for a woman’s smile – that is happiness.”
“When you like someone, you like them in spite of their faults. When you love someone, you love them with their faults.”
“I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me.”
“One can beg, buy, be presented with, and find love in the streets, but it can never be stolen.”
“Not in his speech, not in his thoughts, I see his greatness, only in his actions, in his life.”
“Each man’s life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself.”
“Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.”
“All interpretation, all psychology, all attempts to make things comprehensible, require the medium of theories, mythologies, and lies.”
“Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try again and again to console my heart and pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell.”
“I believe that the struggle against death, the unconditional and self-willed determination to live, is the mode of power behind the lives and activities of all outstanding men.”
“Siddhartha stopped fighting his fate this very hour, and he stopped suffering.”
“The true profession of a man is to find his way to himself.”
“The world was beautiful when looked at in this way-without any seeking, so simple, so childlike.”
“Things are going downhill with you!’ he said to himself, and laughed about it, and as he was saying it, he happened to glance at the river, and he also saw the river going downhill, always moving on downhill, and singing and being happy through it all.”
“Opinions mean nothing; they may be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can embrace or reject them.”
“One cannot apologize for something fundamental, and a child feels and knows this as well and as deeply as any sage.”
“Faith is stronger than so-called reason.”
“I suddenly saw how sad and artificial my life had been during this period, for the loves, friends, habits and pleasures of these years were discarded like badly fitting clothes. I parted from them without pain and all that remained was to wonder that I could have endured them so long.”
“For the first time in my life I tasted death, and death tasted bitter, for death is birth, is fear and dread of some terrible renewal.”
“He had loved and he had found himself. Most people love to lose themselves.”
“An enlightened man had but one duty – to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led.”
“At one time I had given much thought to why men were so very rarely capable of living for an ideal. Now I saw that many, no, all men were capable of dying for one.”
“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 Nature and Life.”
“I, also, would like to look and smile, sit and walk like that, so free, so worthy, so restrained, so candid, so childlike and mysterious. A man only looks and walks like that when he has conquered his Self. I also will conquer my Self.”
“A father can pass on his nose and eyes and even his intelligence to his child, but not his soul. In every human being the soul is new”