Herman Hesse

Germany
2 Jul 1877 // 9 Aug 1962
Writer

Quotes

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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.

Siddhartha
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.

The Glass Bead Game
What is meditation?... It is fleeing from the self, it is a short escape of the agony of being a self, it is a short numbing of the senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life. The same escape, the same short numbing is what the driver of an ox-cart finds in the inn, drinking a few bowls of rice wine or fermented coconut-milk.

Siddhartha
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.

Steppenwolf
Love is like death. It is fulfillment and an evening after which nothing more may follow.

The Fairy Tales of 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.

The Journey to the East
Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.

Siddhartha
The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect or confined at a point somewhere along a gradual pathway toward perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment.

Siddhartha
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.

Siddhartha
Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One's born and at once one is guilty.

Steppenwolf
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On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays