Hermann Hesse

“Our god’s name is Abraxas and he is God and Satan and he contains both the luminous and the dark world.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Everything that was not suffered to the end and finally concluded, recurred, and the same sorrows were undergone.” ~ Hermann Hesse

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

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Art is the contemplation of the world in a state of grace.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“This happiness consisted of nothing else but the harmony of the few things around me with my own existence, a feeling of contentment and well-being that needed no changes and no intensification.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“The truth has a million faces, but there is only one truth.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, affliction, or infamy. We kill when, because it is easier, we countenance, or pretend to approve of atrophied social, political, educational, and religious institutions, instead of resolutely combating them.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“What you search is not necessarily the same as what you find. When you let go of the searching, you start finding.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is only your aversion to it that hurts, nothing else.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“It was the first rent in the holy image of my father, it was the first fissure in the columns that had upheld my childhood, which every individual must destroy before he can become himself.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Words can not express the joy of new life.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Your soul is the whole world.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Siddhartha has one single goal-to become empty, to become empty of thirst, desire, dreams, pleasure and sorrow-to let the Self die. No longer to be Self, to experience the peace of an emptied heart, to experience pure thought-that was his goal.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“We have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“It taught him how to listen – how to listen with a quiet heart and a waiting soul, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgment, without opinion.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“A house without books is a poor house, even if beautiful rugs are covering its floors and precious wallpapers and pictures cover its walls.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“The voices of all creatures are in the voices of the river.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Happiness is love, nothing else.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“How foolish it is to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Dreams and restless thoughts came flowing to him from the river, from the twinkling stars at night, from the sun’s melting rays. Dreams and a restlessness of the soul came to him.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“You have to try the impossible to achieve the possible.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“To nobody can you communicate in words and teachings, what happened to you in your hour of enlightenment.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Making music together is the best way for two people to become friends.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“I shall begin my story with an experience I had when I was ten and attended our small town’s Latin school.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Everyone had only one true vocation: to find himself. Let him wind up as a poet or a madman, as a prophet or a criminal – that wasn’t his business; in the long run, it was irrelevant. His business was to discover his own destiny, not just any destiny, and to live it totally and undividedly. Anything else was just a half-measure, an attempt to run away, an escape back to the ideal of the masses, an adaptation, fear of one’s own nature.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“The words are not good for the secret meaning, everything always becomes a bit different, as soon as it is put into words, gets distorted a bit, a bit silly – yes, and this is also very good, and I like it a lot, I also very much agree with this, that this what is one man’s treasure and wisdom always sounds like foolishness to another person.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Chaos demands to be recognized and experienced before letting itself be converted into a new order.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“I felt knowledge and the unity of the world circulate in me like my own blood.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“In every truth, the opposite is equally true. A truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is one-sided.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Not in his speech, not in his thoughts, I see his greatness, only in his actions, in his life.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Solitude is independence.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Within you there is a stillness and sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“The river is everywhere.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“In the beginning was the myth. God, in his search for self -expression, invested the souls of Hindus, Greeks, and Germans with poetic shapes and continues to invest each child ’s soul with poetry every day.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“What for me is bliss and life and ecstasy and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in life it finds it absurd.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Wenn wir einen Menschen hassen, so hassen wir in seinem Bild etwas, was in uns selber sitzt. Was nicht in uns selber ist, das regt uns nicht auf.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Faith is stronger than so-called reason.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“If the chick is not able to break the shell of his egg, he will die without being born. We are – chick. The world – is our egg. If we do not break the shell of the world, then we will die without being born.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“I want to learn from myself, want to be my student, want to get to know myself, the secret of Siddhartha.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“I have always been a great dreamer. In dreams I have always been more active than in my real life, and these shadows sapped me of my health and energy.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“The river taught us how to listen with a silent heart, with a waiting open soul…” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Love must neither beg nor demand. Love must be strong enough to find certainty within itself. It then cease to be moved and becomes the mover.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“I call that man awake who, with conscious knowledge and understanding, can perceive the deep unreasoning powers in his soul, his whole innermost strength, desire and weakness, and knows how to reckon with himself.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?” That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“The true profession of a man is to find his way to himself.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my loving understanding; then all is well with me and nothing can harm me.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world.” ~ Hermann Hesse

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

“The world was beautiful when looked at in this way-without any seeking, so simple, so childlike.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“I saw Demian’s face and remarked that it was not a boy’s face but a man’s and then I saw, or rather became aware, that it was not really the face of a man either; it had something different about it, almost a feminine element. And for the time being his face seemed neither masculine nor childish, neither old nor young but a hundred years old, almost timeless and bearing the mark of other periods of history than our own.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Happiness is a how; not a what. A talent, not an object.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“I have always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“My real self wanders elsewhere, far away, wanders on and on invisibly and has nothing to do with my life.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Every important cultural gesture comes down to a morality, a model for human behavior concentrated into a gesture.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Good that you ask – you should always ask, always have doubts.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“You must find your dream, then the way becomes easy.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“But your questions, which are unanswerable without exception, all spring from the same erroneous thinking.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“No permanence is ours, we are a wave that flows to fit whatever form it finds.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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?” ~ Hermann Hesse

“I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life’s wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Every person’s life is a journey toward himself, the attempt at a journey, the intimation of a path. No person has ever been completely himself, but each one strives to become so, some gropingly, others more lucidly, according to his abilities. Each one carries with him to the end traces of his birth, the slime and eggshells of a primordial world.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“To achieve the possible, we must attempt the impossible again and again.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Every experience has its element of magic.” ~ Hermann Hesse

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

“When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them!” ~ Hermann Hesse

“All higher humor begins with ceasing to take oneself seriously.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“A man who is ill-adjusted to the world is always on the verge of finding himself. One who is adjusted to the world never finds himself, but gets to be a cabinet minister.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Loneliness is the way by which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Manche denken, Festhalten macht uns stark. Aber manchmal ist es das Loslassen.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Only the ideas that we really live have any value.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Faith and doubt go hand in hand, they are complementaries. One who never doubts will never truly believe.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Theory is knowledge that doesn’t work. Practice is when everything works and you don’t know why.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“How could I fail to be a lone wolf, and an uncouth hermit, as I did not share one of its aims nor understand one of its pleasures?” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can – that is their secret.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. You, O worthy one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Each man’s life represents a road toward himself.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“If my life were not a dangerous, painful experiment, if I did not constantly skirt the abyss and feel the void under my feet, my life would have no meaning and I would not have been able to write anything.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Who travels far will often see things Far removed from what was believed as Truth.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Every phenomenon on earth is symbolic, and each symbol is an open gate through which the soul, if it is ready, can enter into the inner part of the world, where you and I and day and night are all one.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“I live in my dreams – that’s what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That’s the difference.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“When the suffering becomes acute enough, one goes forward.” ~ Hermann Hesse

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

“If a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Did all this make sense?” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence.” ~ Hermann Hesse

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

“I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am responsible for what I do with the life I’ve got.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Every healthy person must have a goal in life and that life must have content.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening…” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others.” ~ Hermann Hesse

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

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“And when Siddhartha was listening attentively to this river, this song of a thousand voices, when he neither listened to the suffering nor the laughter, when he did not tie his soul to any particular voice and submerged his self into it, but when he heard them all, perceived the whole, the oneness, then the great song of the thousand voices consisted of a single word, which was Om: the perfection.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“It is extremely beautiful to belong to a woman, to give yourself. Don’t laugh if I sound foolish. But to love a woman, you see, to abandon yourself to her, to absorb her completely and feel absorbed by her, that is not what you call ‘being in love,’ which you mock a little. For me it is the road to life, the way toward the meaning of life.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Only within yourself exists the other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Opinions mean nothing; they may be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can embrace or reject them.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God’s name is Abraxas.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“I can think. I can wait. I can fast.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray that finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“A mere nothing suffices – and the lightning strikes.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“When we hate a person, what we hate in his image is something inside ourselves. Whatever isn’t inside us can’t excite us.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Every man’s story is important, eternal and sacred. That is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous and worthy of every consideration.” ~ Hermann Hesse

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

“You knew all along that your sanctioned world was only half the world, and you tried to suppress the other half the same way the priests and teachers do. You won’t succeed. No one succeeds in this once he has begun to think.” ~ Hermann Hesse

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

“Each of us has to find out for himself what is permitted and what is forbidden… forbidden for him. It’s possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard. And vice versa.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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…” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Abraxas was the god who was both god and devil.” ~ Hermann Hesse

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

“Smiling, Siddhartha felt happiness at the friendship and friendliness of the ferryman. He is like Govinda, he thought, smiling. All the people I meet upon my way are like Govinda. All of them are grateful, though they themselves have cause to expect gratitude. All of them are deferential, all are eager to be a friend, to obey and think little. People are children.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“The greatest threat to our world and its peace comes from those who want war, who prepare for it, and who, by holding out vague promises of future peace or by instilling fear of foreign aggression, try to make us accomplices to their plans.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Each man had only one genuine vocation to find the way to himself.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“In this hour, Siddhartha stopped fighting his fate, stopped suffering. On his face flourished the cheerfulness of a knowledge, which is no longer opposed by any will, which knows perfection, which is in agreement with the flow of events, with the current of life, full of sympathy for the pain of others, full of sympathy for the pleasure of others, devoted to the flow, belonging to the oneness.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“One must find the source within one’s own Self, one must possess it. Everything else was seeking – a detour, an error.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“All life is a breath exhaled by God. All dying is a breath inhaled by God.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“He saw that the water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“The best weapons against the infamies of life are courage, wilfulness and patience. Courage strenthens, wilfulness is fun and patience provides tranquility.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Whether you and I and a few others will renew the world some day remains to be seen. But within ourselves we must renew it each day.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“There is a miracle in every new beginning.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Siddhartha stopped fighting his fate this very hour, and he stopped suffering.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“So you find yourself surrounded by death and horror in the world, and you escape it into lust. But lust has no duration; it leaves you again in the desert.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“It was all a lie, it all stank, stank of lies, it all gave the illusion of meaning and happiness and beauty, and all of it was just putrefaction that no one would admit to. Bitter was the taste of the world. Life was a torment.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“The opposite of every truth is just as true.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Friendship is identification and difference.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Yes, I am going into the woods; I am going into the unity of all things.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Knowledge can be conveyed, but not wisdom. It can be found, it can be lived, it is possible to be carried by it, miracles can be performed with it, but it cannot be expressed in words and taught.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“He had loved and he had found himself. Most people love to lose themselves.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“In fear I hurried this way and that. I had the taste of blood and chocolate in my mouth, the one as hateful as the other.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“There is no reality except the one contained within us.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Ich wollte ja nichts als das zu leben versuchen, was von selber aus mir heraus wollte. Warum war das so sehr schwer?” ~ Hermann Hesse

“Beauty does not bring happiness to the one who possesses it, but to the one who loves and admires it.” ~ Hermann Hesse

“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.” ~ Hermann Hesse