Explore Quotes by Hermann Hesse

Love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is only your aversion to it that hurts, nothing else.

A tree says: _x000D_ My strength is trust. _x000D_ I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. _x000D_ I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. _x000D_ I trust that God is in me. _x000D_ I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

Life is waiting everywhere, the future is flowering everywhere, but we only see a small part of it and step on much of it with our feet

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.

Whether you and I and a few others will renew the world some day remains to be seen. But within ourselves we must renew it each day.

A magic dwells in each beginning, protecting us, telling us how to live.

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.

Were not the gods forms created like me and you, mortal, transient?

In every truth, the opposite is equally true. For example, a truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is onesided.

Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.

Every sin already carries grace within in, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people - eternal life. The Buddha exists in the robber and dice player; the robber exists in the Brahmin.

All higher humor begins with ceasing to take oneself seriously.

Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.

When we hate a person, what we hate in his image is something inside ourselves. Whatever isn't inside us can't excite us.

There is a miracle in every new beginning

Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long.

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me.

The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.

Knowledge can be conveyed, but not wisdom. It can be found, it can be lived, it is possible to be carried by it, miracles can be performed with it, but it cannot be expressed in words and taught.

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