Hermann Hesse
Hermann Hesse
Hermann Karl Hessewas a German-born Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. His best-known works include Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game, each of which explores an individual's search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth2 July 1877
CityCalw, Germany
CountryGermany
men way synchronicity
Each man had only one genuine vocation to find the way to himself
people want should
You should never be afraid of people... such fear can destroy us completely. You've simply got to get rid of it, if you want to turn into someone decent. You understand that, don't you?
tree longing-for-home preacher
For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers.
self voice judging
The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer's voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death.
flower heart light
As every flower fades and as all youth departs, so life at every stage, so every virtue, so our grasp of truth blooms in its day and may not last forever. Since life may summon us at every age, be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavour, be ready bravely and without remorse to find new light that old ties cannot give. In all beginnings dwells a magic force for guarding us and helping us to live.
self errors siddhartha
One must find the source within one's own Self, one must possess it. Everything else was seeking -- a detour, an error.
home tree looks
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.
latin book school
I shall begin my story with an experience I had when I was ten and attended our small town's Latin school.
book way gone
The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life.
life trying difficult
All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?
suffering investing enough
When the suffering becomes acute enough, one goes forward.
beautiful morning writing
Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old brittle husk.
men shining lovely
It was lovely, and tempting, to exert power over men and to shine before others, but power also had its perditions and perils.
music thinking moral
I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.