Hermann Hesse Quotes

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

Fate and temperament are two words for one and the same concept.

Property, possessions and riches had also finally trapped him. They were no longer a game and a toy. They had become a chain and a burden.

Love is the most important thing in the world. 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.

You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.

What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world.

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.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world.

Only the ideas that we actually live are of any value.

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

It matters little that you suffer, so long as you feel alive with a sense of the close bond that connects all living things, so long as love does not die!