Best 584 quotes of Hermann Hesse on MyQuotes

A game master or teacher who was primarily concerned with being close enough to the "innermost meaning" would be a very bad teacher. To be candid, I myself, for example, have never in my life said a word to my pupils about the "meaning" of music; if there is one it does not need my explanations. On the other hand I have always made a great point of having my pupils count their eighths and sixteenths nicely. Whatever you become, teacher, scholar, or musician, have respect for the "meaning" but do not imagine that it can be taught.

Age is a state of mind. Youth and age exist only among the ordinary people. All the more talented and exceptional of us; are sometimes old, just as we are sometimes happy, and sometimes sad.

A girl had bidden me eat and drink and sleep, and had shown me friendship and had laughed at me and had called me a silly little boy. And this wonderful friend had talked to me of the saints and shown me that even when I had outdone myself in absurdity I was not alone.

A home isn't just a roof over our heads. A home is a place where we feel loved and where we love others. It's a place we belong. Love is what makes a home, not the contents inside the house or the number on the door. It's the people waiting for us across the threshold, the people who will take us in their arms after a ad day and kiss us good night and good morning everyday for the rest of our lives.

A house without books is a poor house, even if beautiful rugs are covering its floors and precious wallpapers and pictures cover its walls

All it has experienced, tasted, suffered: The course of years, generations of animals, Oppression, recovery, friendship of sun and - Wind Will pour forth each day in the song Of its rustling foliage, in the friendly Gesture of its gently swaying crown, In the delicate sweet scent of resinous Sap moistening the sleep-glued buds, And the eternal game of lights and Shadows it plays with itself, content.

Alas, Siddhartha, I see you suffering, but you're suffering a pain at which one would like to laugh, at which you'll soon laugh for yourself.

All birth means separation from the All, the confinement within limitation, the separation from God, the pangs of being born ever anew. The return into the All, the dissolution of painful individuation, the reunion with God means the expansion of the soul until it is able once more to embrace the All.

All interpretation, all psychology, all attempts to make things comprehensible, require the medium of theories, mythologies, and lies.

All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?

All men of goodwill have this in common - that our works put us to shame.

All suicides have the responsibility of fighting against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be conquered by life than to fall by one's own hand.

All the books of the world full of thoughts and poems are nothing in comparison to a minute of sobbing, when feeling surges in waves, the soul feels itself profoundly and finds itself. Tears are the melting ice of snow. All angels are close to the crying person.

All this had always been and he had never seen it; he was never present. Now he was present and belonged to it. Through his eyes he saw light and shadows; through his mind he was aware of moon and stars.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening...

Among mathematicians, even in those days, the reputation of being a good Glass Bead Game player meant a great deal; it was equivalent to being a very good mathematician.

Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

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.

And here is a doctrine at which you will laugh. It seems to me, Govinda, that love is the most important thing in the world.

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.

And what is called history at school, and all we learn by heart there about heroes and geniuses and great deeds and fine emotions, is all nothing but a swindle invented by the schoolmasters for educational reasons to keep children occupied for a given number of years. It has always been so and always will be.

And whether this happiness lasted a hundred seconds or ten minutes, it was so far removed from time that it resembled every other genuine happiness as completely as one fluttering blue lycaenid butterfly resembles another.

Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism.

a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful.

Art is contemplation of the world in a state of grace and imaginatively reflecting that subjective understanding.

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

As every flower fades and as all youth departs, so life at every stage, so every virtue, so our grasp of truth blooms in its day and may not last forever. Since life may summon us at every age, be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavour, be ready bravely and without remorse to find new light that old ties cannot give. In all beginnings dwells a magic force for guarding us and helping us to live.

...As every one of us knows, there are some festivals and games in which everything goes right, and every element lifts up, animates, and exalts every other, just as there are theatrical and musical performances which without any clearly discernible cause seem to ascend miraculously to glorious climaxes and intensely felt experiences, whereas others, just as well prepared, remain no more than decent tries.

A soul that is ruined in the bud will frequently return to the springtime of its beginning and its promise-filled childhood, as though it could discover new hopes there and retie the broken threads of life. The shoots grow rapidly and eagerly, but it is only a sham life that will never be a genuine tree.

A thousand times I was ready to regret and take back my rash statement - yet it had been the truth.

A tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me!... Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

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.

At that time two opposing concepts of the Game called forth commentary and discussion. The foremost players distinguished two principal types of Game, the formal and the psychological.

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, and everything made sense.

A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to committ outrages.

Beautiful was this world, looking at it thus, without searching, thus simply, thus childlike.

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.

But it's a poor fellow who can't take his pleasure without asking other people's permission.

But one thing this doctrine, so clean, so venerable, does not contain: it does nto contain the secret of what the Sublime One himself experienced, he alone among the hundreds of thousands. This is why I am continuing my wanderings not to seek another, better doctrine, because I know there is none, but to leave behind all the teachings and all teachers, and either attain my goal alone or die.

But peace, too, is a living thing and like all life it must wax and wane, accommodate, withstand trials, and undergo changes.

But your questions, which are unanswerable without exception, all spring from the same erroneous thinking.

Chaos demands to be recognized and experienced before letting itself be converted into a new order.

Deeply, he felt the love for the run-away in his heart, like a wound, and he felt at the same time that this wound had not been given to him in order to turn the knife in it, that it had to become a blossom and had to shine. That this wound did not blossom yet, did not shine yet, at this hour, made him sad. Instead of the desired goal, which had drawn him here following the runaway son, there was now emptiness.

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.

During deep meditation it is possible to dispel time, to see simultaneously all the past, present, and future, and then everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman.

Each man carries the vestiges of his birth; the slime and eggshells of his primeval past with him to the end of his days. Some never become human, remaining frog, lizard, ant. Some are human above the waist, fish below.

Each man had only one genuine vocation to find the way to himself.

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. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness.

Each of us is merely one human being, merely an experiment, a way station. But each of us should be on the way toward perfection, should be striving to reach the center, not the periphery.

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