Quotes by Hermann Hesse

The Wolf trots to and fro,The world lies deep in snow,The raven from the birch tree flies,But nowhere a hare, nowhere a roe,The roe -she is so dear, so sweet -If such a thing I might surpriseIn my embrace, my teeth would meet,What else is there beneath the skies?The lovely creature I would so treasure,And feast myself deep on her tender thigh,I would drink of her red blood full measure,Then howl till the night went by.Even a hare I would not despise;Sweet enough its warm flesh in the night.Is everything to be deniedThat could make life a little bright?The hair on my brush is getting grey.The sight is failing from my eyes.Years ago my dear mate died.And now I trot and dream of a roe.I trot and dream of a hare.I hear the wind of midnight howl.I cool with the snow my burning jowl,And on to the devil my wretched soul I bear.

It [enlightenment] has not come to you by means of teaching! And-thus is my thought, oh exalted one,-nobody will obtain salvation by means of teachings! (character of Siddhartha, speaking to the Buddha)

It is good, he thought, to get a taste of everything for oneself, which one needs to know. That lust for the world and riches do not belong to the good things, I have already learned as a child. I have known it for a long time, but I have experienced only now. And now I know it, dont just know it in my memory, but in my eyes, in my heart, in my stomach. Good for me, to know this!

But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the worlds phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again.That is why every mans story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual, the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.

For awakened human beings, there was no obligation—none, none, none at all—except this: to search for yourself, become sure of yourself, feel your way forward along your own path, wherever it led.

Possibly the apparent relapse they had suffered was not a fall and a cause for suffering, but a leap forward and a positive act.

Gratitude is not a virtue I believe in, and to me it seems hypocritical to expect it from a child.

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

For it cannot be denied that all over the world and in all ages there are beings who are perceived to be extraordinary, charming, and appealing, and whom many honor as benevolent spirits, because they make one think of a more beautiful, a freer, a more winged life than the one we lead.

Once a man takes honesty as his ideal, he cannot confine himself to showing the pleasant and reasonable side of his nature.

Once a man takes honesty as his ideal, he cannot confine himself to showing to pleasant and reasonable side of his nature.

Siddhartha began to understand that it was not happiness and peace that had come to him with his son but, rather, sorrow and worry. But he loved him and preferred the sorrow and worry of love to the happiness and peace he had known without the boy.

That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged — to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony.

They slept profoundly, desperately, greedily, as though for the last time, as though they had been condemned to stay awake forever and had to drink in all the sleep in the world during these last hours.

It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.

Natures of your kind, with strong, delicate senses, the soul-oriented, the dreamers, poets, lovers are always superior to us creatures of the mind. You take your being from your mothers. You live fully; you were endowed with the strength of love, the ability to feel. Whereas we creatures of reason, we dont live fully; we live in an arid land, even though we often seem to guide and rule you. Yours is the plentitude of life, the sap of the fruit, the garden of passion, the beautiful landscape of art. Your home is the earth; ours is the world of ideas. You are in danger of drowning in the world of the senses; ours is the danger of suffocating in an airless void. You are an artist; I am a thinker. You sleep at your mothers breast; I wake in the desert. For me the sun shines; for you the moon and the stars.

And so the Steppenwolf had two natures, a human and a wolfish one. This was his fate, and it may well be that it was not a very exceptional one. There must have been many men who have had a good deal of the dog or the fox, of the fish or the serpent in them without experiencing any extraordinary difficulties on that account. In such cases, the man and the fish lived on together and neither did the other any harm. The one even helped the other. Many a man indeed has carried this condition to such enviable lengths that he has owed his happiness more to the fox or the ape in him than the man.

For there is not a single human being, not even the primitive Negro, not even the idiot, who is so conveniently simple that his being can be explained as the sum of two or three principal elements; and to explain so complex a man as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a hopelessly childish attempt. Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyones does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands.

Love of God, he said slowly, searching for words, is not alwaysthe same as love of good, I wish it were that simple. We know whatis good, it is written in the Commandments. But God is notcontained only in the Commandments, you know; they are only aninfinitesimal part of Him. A man may abide by the Commandmentsand be far from God.

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