"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."
— Hermann Hesse

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

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

"Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours."
— Hermann Hesse

"Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish."
— Hermann Hesse

"Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal."
— Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)

"Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again."
— Hermann Hesse

"You must find your dream...but no dream lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular dream."
— Hermann Hesse

"I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me."
— Hermann Hesse

"For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

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

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness."
— Hermann Hesse

"If I know what love is, it is because of you."
— Hermann Hesse

"Love shouldn't beg and demand. Love must have the power to get confidence in itself. Only then it won't be attracted, but will attract."
— Hermann Hesse

"'One never reaches home,' she said. 'But where paths that have an affinity for each other intersect, the whole world looks like home, for a time.'"
— Hermann Hesse (Demian)

"Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness."
— Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)

"We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being."
— Hermann Hesse

"In eternity there is no time, only an instant long enough for a joke."
— Hermann Hesse (Steppenwolf)

"I live in my dreams. Other people live in dreams too . . . just not their own."
— Hermann Hesse

"What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find."
— Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)

"Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure."
— Hermann Hesse (Wer lieben kann ist glücklich. Über die Liebe.)

"Three things can not hide for long: the Moon, the Sun and the Truth.
- Siddhartha Gautama"
— Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)

"Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak..surrender to them. Don't ask first whether it's permitted, or would please your teachers or father or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that."
— Hermann Hesse

"It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is."
— Hermann Hesse

"I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?"
— Hermann Hesse

"There is no escape. You can't be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don't try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror man is- particularly the artist- particularly myself!"
— Hermann Hesse

"There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself."
— Hermann Hesse

"To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do. "
— Hermann Hesse

"Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can - that is their secret. "
— Hermann Hesse

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

"Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them."
— Hermann Hesse (Demian)

"I shall no longer be instructed by the Yoga Veda or the Aharva Veda, or the ascetics, or any other doctrine whatsoever. I shall learn from myself, be a pupil of myself; I shall get to know myself, the mystery of Siddhartha." He looked around as if he were seeing the world for the first time."
— Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)

"When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols..."
— Hermann Hesse (Steppenwolf)

"He has robbed me, yet he has given me something of greater value . . . he has given to me myself."
— Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)

"Within Siddhartha there slowly grew and ripened the knowledge of what wisdom really was and the goal of his long seeking. It was nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life."
— Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)

"When you like someone, you like them in spite of their faults. When you love someone, you love them with their faults."
— Hermann Hesse (Wer lieben kann ist glücklich. Über die Liebe.)

"For 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."
— Hermann Hesse (Steppenwolf)

"'You've never lived what you are thinking, and that isn't good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.'"
— Hermann Hesse (Demian)

"Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it. "
— Hermann Hesse

"Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud. "
— Hermann Hesse

"You are only afraid 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!"
— Hermann Hesse

"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?"
— Hermann Hesse (Demian)

"Among the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he created with his own mind, the world of books is the greatest. Every child, scrawling his first letters on his slate and attempting to read for the first time, in so doing, enters an artificial and complicated world; to know the laws and rules of this world completely and to practice them perfectly, no single human life is long enough. Without words, without writing, and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. And if anyone wants to try to enclose in a small space in a single house or single room, the history of the human spirit and to make it his own, he can only do this in the form of a collection of books."
— Hermann Hesse (My Belief)

"I have always been a great dreamer. In dreams I have always been more active than in my real life, and these shadows sapped me of my health and energy."
— Hermann Hesse

"It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect."
— Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)

"Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself....His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness."
— Hermann Hesse

"When someone is seeking,” said Siddartha, “It happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. You, O worthy one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose."
— Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)

"I can think. I can wait. I can fast."
— Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)

"Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared."
— Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)

"'Good that you ask -- you should always ask, always have doubts.'"
— Hermann Hesse (Demian)

"The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes almost arrogant. You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine's Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world's puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies. "
— Hermann Hesse

"Often it is the most deserving people who cannont help loving those who destory them. "
— Hermann Hesse