Hermann Hesse

“I have always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions.”

“There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge-that is everywhere, that is Atman, that is in me and you a...”

“I felt knowledge and the unity of the world circulate in me like my own blood.”

“I already thought on that first evening of our meeting how glorious it would be to spend one's whole life regarded by those beautiful, candid eyes, and how it would then be impossible ever t...”

“...your tranquil yes to the changing over into the formless void of the unlimited.”

“And many years later, as an adult student of history, Knecht was to perceive more distinctly that history cannot come into being without the substance and the dynamism of this sinful world o...”

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

“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 h...”

“Every true reader could, even if not one new book were published, spend decades and centuries studying on, fighting on, continuing to rejoice in the treasure of those already at hand.”

“Teachers dread nothing so much as unusual characteristics in precocious boys during the initial stages of their adolescence. A certain streak of genius makes an ominous impression on them, f...”

“Thus the struggle between rule and spirit repeats itself year after year from school to school. The authorities go to infinite pains to nip the few profound or more valuable intellects in th...”

“Until 1914 I loved to travel; I often went to Italy and once spent a few months in India. Since then I have almost entirely abandoned travelling, and I have not been outside of Switzerland f...”

“In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.”

“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.”

“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 asser...”

“It was as if all of the happiness, all of the magic of this blissful hour had flowed together into these stirring, bittersweet tones and flowed away, becoming temporal and transitory once mo...”

“If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.”

“The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life's wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.”

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

“Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship betwe...”