Hermann Hesse

Only within yourself exists the other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul.

Art is the contemplation of the world in a state of grace.

Passion is always a mystery and unaccountable, and unfortunately there is no doubt that life does not spare its purest children; often it is just the most deserving people who cannot help loving those that destroy them.

God does not send us despair in order to kill us; he sends it in order to awaken us to new life.

Without a mother, one cannot love. Without a mother, one cannot die.

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?

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

I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.

our friendship has no other purpose, no other reason, than to show you how utterly unlike me you are.

What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you're searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don't find the time for finding?

Painting is marvelous; it makes you happier and more patient. Afterwards you do not have black fingers as with writing, but blue and red ones.

In my brain were stored a thousand pictures.

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.

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.

Romantic souvenirs had a way of attaching themselves to one when one wanted to move on, but they were not to be taken seriously.

You are only afriad if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them!

Each man's life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path... But each of us - experiments of the depths - strives toward his own destiny. We can understand one another; but each of us is able to interpret himself to himself alone.

a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful.

The opposite of every truth is just as true.

I suddenly saw how sad and artificial my life had been during this period, for the loves, friends, habits and pleasures of these years were discarded like badly fitting clothes. I parted from them without pain and all that remained was to wonder that I could have endured them so long.

Deeply, he felt the love for the run-away in his heart, like a wound, and he felt at the same time that this wound had not been given to him in order to turn the knife in it, that it had to become a blossom and had to shine. That this wound did not blossom yet, did not shine yet, at this hour, made him sad. Instead of the desired goal, which had drawn him here following the runaway son, there was now emptiness.