Hermann Hesse Quotes

If I know what love is, it is because of you.

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.

Not in his speech, not in his thoughts, I see his greatness, only in his actions, in his life.

Often it is the most deserving people who cannot help loving those who destroy them.

I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.

Let me say no more. Words do no justice to the hidden meaning. Everything immediately becomes slightly different when it is expressed in words, a little bit distorted, a little foolish...It is perfectly fine with me that what for one man is precious wisdom for another sounds like foolery.

I felt knowledge and the unity of the world circulate in me like my own blood.

The world was beautiful when looked at in this way - without any seeking, so simple, so childlike.

You show the world as a complete, unbroken chain, an eternal chain, linked together by cause and effect.

When you like someone, you like them in spite of their faults. When you love someone, you love them with their faults.

Love must not entreat,' she added, 'or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract.

Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.

Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can - that is their secret.

In eternity there is no time, only an instant long enough for a joke.

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.

You've never lived what you are thinking, and that isn't good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.

You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.

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

There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.

The whole of world history often seems to me nothing more than a picture book which portrays humanity's most powerful and a senseless desire - the desire to forget. Does not each generation, by means of suppression, concealment, and ridicule, efface what the previous generation considered most important?