Hermann Hesse Quotes

"The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire"

"Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader."

"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 cr"

"As a body everyone is single, as a soul never."

"People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest."

"Love is stronger than violence."

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

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

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

"I have known it for a long time but I have only just experienced it. Now I know it not only with my intellect, but with my eyes, with my heart, with my stomach."

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

"To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, young man, and possibly a tragic one."

"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."

"The truth is lived, not taught."

"Happiness is a how; not a what. A talent, not an object."

"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."

"Wisdom is not communicable."

"What I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity."

"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"

"Knowledge can be communicated, but wisdom cannot. A man can find it, he can live it, he can be filled and sustained by it, but he cannot utter or teach it."