110+ Hermann Hesse Quotes On Trees, Philosophical And Introspective

Hermann Hesse was a German-born Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. He is best known for his novels Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game, as well as for his many short stories. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946 for his body of work. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Hermann Hesse on love, trees, life.

Top 10 Hermann Hesse Quotes

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. When you like someone, you like them in spite of their faults. When you love someone, you love them with their faults.
4. The truth is lived, not taught.
5. I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?
6. People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.
7. 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.
8. Love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is only your aversion to it that hurts, nothing else.
9. There is no reality except the one contained within us.
10. 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 Image Quotes

People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest. — Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse Short Quotes

• Each man had only one genuine vocation to find the way to himself.
• madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom
• When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.
• The truth has a million faces, but there is only one truth.
• Loneliness is the way by which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself.
• To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.
• Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.
• Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.
• Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
• Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

Hermann Hesse Quotes About Love

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

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

. . . gentleness is stronger than severity, water is stronger than rock, love is stronger than force. — 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

You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else. — Hermann Hesse

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. — Hermann Hesse

What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us. — Hermann Hesse

Lovers should not separate from each other after making love without admiring each other, without being conquered as well as conquering, so that no feeling of satiation or desolation arises nor the horrid feeling of misusing or having been misused. — Hermann Hesse

Love is stronger than violence. — Hermann Hesse

I hope death will be a great happiness, a happiness as great as that of love, fulfilled love — Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse Quotes About Trees

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. — 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

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

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all. — Hermann Hesse

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. — Hermann Hesse

Fortunately, like most children, I had learned what is most valuable, most indispensable for life before school years began, taught by apple trees, by rain and sun, river and woods. — Hermann Hesse

The tree does not die, it waits. — Hermann Hesse

For mountain and stream, tree and leaf, root and blossom, every form in nature is echoed in us and originates in the soul whose being is eternity and is hidden from us but none the less gives itself to us for the most part in the power of love and creation. — Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse Quotes About Life

We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots and executions. We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, suffering and shame.In the same way all disrespect for life, all hard-heartedness,all indifference, all contempt is nothing else than killing. — Hermann Hesse

Each man's life represents a road toward himself. — 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

Man's life seems to me like a long, weary night that would be intolerable if there were not occasionally flashes of light, the sudden brightness of which is so comforting and wonderful, that the moments of their appearance cancel out and justify the years of darkness. — 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

Words can not express the joy of new life. — 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

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. — 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

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

Hermann Hesse Quotes About World

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 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. — 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

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

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

One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time. — 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

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

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

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

Hermann Hesse Quotes About Live

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men -- each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature -- are shot down wholesale. — 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

Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others. — Hermann Hesse

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

The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. — 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 am much inclined to live from my rucksack, and let my trousers fray as they like. — 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

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

Only the ideas that we really live have any value. — Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse Quotes About Real

Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. — Hermann Hesse

To recognize causes is to think, and through thought alone feelings become knowledge and are not lost, but become real and begin to mature. — Hermann Hesse

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale. — Hermann Hesse

I have always been a great dreamer; in dreams I am more active than in my real life, and these shadows sapped me of health and energy. — 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

Hermann Hesse Famous Quotes And Sayings

People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest. — Hermann Hesse

People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest. It was a scandal that a breed of fearless and sinister people ran around freely, so they attached a nickname and a myth to these people to get even with them, to make up for the many times they had felt afraid. — 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

Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak... surrender to them. Don't ask first whether it's permitted, or would please your teachers or father or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that. — 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. — Hermann Hesse

Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves. — 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. 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

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

Slowly blossomed, slowly ripened in Siddhartha the realisation, the knowledge, what wisdom actually was, what the goal of his long search was. It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, an ability, a secret art, to think every moment, while living his life, the thought of oneness, to be able to feel and inhale the oneness. — Hermann Hesse

Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them. — 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

You can ride, you can travel with a friend of your own; The final step you must take alone. No wisdom is better than this when known: That every hard thing is done alone. — 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

Thus Gotama [Buddha] walked toward the town to gather alms, and the two samanas recognized him solely by the perfection of his repose, by the calmness of his figure, in which there was no trace of seeking, desiring, imitating, or striving, only light and peace — Hermann Hesse

The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure. — 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

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

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

This day will never come again and anyone who fails to eat and drink and taste and smell it will never have it offered to him again in all eternity. The sun will never shine as it does today...But you must play your part and sing a song, one of your best. — Hermann Hesse

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

He had thought more than other men, and in matters of the intellect he had that calm objectivity, that certainty of thought and knowledge, such as only really intellectual men have, who have no axe to grind, who never wish to shine, or to talk others down, or to appear always in the right. — 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

...Haller's sickness of the soul, as I now know, is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs, a sickness, it seems, that by no means attacks the weak and worthless only but, rather, precisely those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts. — Hermann Hesse

Once you are able to make your request in such a way that you will be quite certain of its fulfillment, then the fulfillment will come. — Hermann Hesse

He was taught by the river. Incessantly, he learned from it. Most of all, he learned from it to listen, to pay close attention with a quiet heart, with a waiting, opened soul, without passion, without a wish, without judgement, without an opinion. — Hermann Hesse

It was morning; through the high window I saw the pure, bright blue of the sky as it hovered cheerfully over the long roofs of the neighboring houses. It too seemed full of joy, as if it had special plans, and had put on its finest clothes for the occasion. — 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

Most people...are like a falling leaf that drifts and turns in the air, flutters, and falls to the ground. But a few others are like stars which travel one defined path: no wind reaches them, they have within themselves their guide and path. — Hermann Hesse

Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain-that it may perhaps be this is not important-but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the small from the same stream, from the same law of cause, of becoming and dying. — Hermann Hesse

You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present. — Hermann Hesse

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

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. — Hermann Hesse

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. — Hermann Hesse

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. — Hermann Hesse

In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified. — Hermann Hesse

Happiness is a how, not a what: a talent, not an object — 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

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

It is good to taste for yourself everything you need to know. That worldly pleasures and wealth are not good things, I learned even as a child. I knew it for a long time, but only now have I experienced it. — 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

I shall no longer be instructed by the Yoga Veda or the Aharva Veda, or the ascetics, or any other doctrine whatsoever. I shall learn from myself, be a pupil of myself; I shall get to know myself, the mystery of Siddhartha." He looked around as if he were seeing the world for the first time. — Hermann Hesse

She stood a moment before my eyes, clearly and painfully, loved and deeply woven into my destiny; then fell away again in a deep oblivion, at a half regretted distance. — Hermann Hesse

The bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self.... And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation andsecurity. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire. — Hermann Hesse

The world, Govinda my friend, is not imperfect, not to be seen as on a slow path toward perfection: No, it is perfect in every moment, all transgression already bears grace within itself, all little children already have the aged in themselves, all the sucklings death, all the dying eternal life. — Hermann Hesse

His way had therefore come full circle, or rather had taken the form of an ellipse or a spiral, following as ever no straight unbroken line, for the rectilinear belongs only to Geometry and not to Nature and Life. — Hermann Hesse

The highest art... sets down its creations and trusts in their magic, without fear of not being understood. — 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

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

If what matters in a person's existence is to accept the inevitable consciously, to taste the good and bad to the full and to make for oneself a more individual, unaccidental and inward destiny alongside one's external fate, then my life has been neither empty nor worthless. — 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

Life Lessons by Hermann Hesse

1. Hermann Hesse's works often emphasize the importance of individual freedom, self-exploration and the search for inner peace.
2. He also encourages us to accept our own limitations and to be open to the beauty of the world around us.
3. Through his works, Hesse teaches us to be mindful of our own feelings and to strive for a life of balance and harmony.