Hermann Hesse Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

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

#Love #Life #Moving On

“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

#Inspirational #Faith #Uplifting

“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

#Time #Ocean #Past

“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

#Stars #Book #Teaching

“To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do.”
-- Hermann Hesse

#Patience #Revenge #People

“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.”
-- Hermann Hesse

#Spiritual #Hate #Hatred

“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

#Inspirational #Life #Wisdom

“The truth is lived, not taught....”
-- Hermann Hesse

#Truth #Taught #Truth Is

“. . . gentleness is stronger than severity, water is stronger than rock, love is stronger than force.”
-- Hermann Hesse

#Love Is #Rocks #Water

“When someone seeks," said Siddhartha, "then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.”
-- Hermann Hesse

#Mean #Eye #Thinking

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche.”
-- Hermann Hesse

#Lonely #Men #Tree

“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

#Rivers #Depth #Taught

“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

#Disappointment #Suffering #Vex

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

#Taken #Laughing #Steppenwolf

“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

#Passion #Home #Creative

“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

#Voice #Water #Siddhartha

“A magic dwells in each beginning, protecting us, telling us how to live...”
-- Hermann Hesse

#Magic

“I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I'm beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn't pleasant, it's not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.”
-- Hermann Hesse

#Dream #Sweet #Stars

“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

#Life #Law #Tree

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

#Book #Writing #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.”
-- Hermann Hesse

#Motivational #Respect #Honor

“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

#Stars #Space #Years

“The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes almost arrogant. You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine's Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world's puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies.”
-- Hermann Hesse

#Conceited #Thinking #Agony

“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

#Goal #Quality #Able

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

#Baby #Joy #New Life

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

#Happiness #You Make Me Happy #Inner Peace

“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

#Opposites #Mind #Lines

“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.”
-- Hermann Hesse

#Inspirational #Sex #Giving

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

#Time #Home #House

“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.”
-- Hermann Hesse

#Home #Sky #Earth