"madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom"
Read quote
37 likes
Quote collection
Hermann Hesse quotes (page 4 of 23)
446 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Every man's story is important, eternal and sacred. That is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous and worthy of every consideration."
Read quote
37 likes
"Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism."
Read quote
35 likes
"Not in his speech, not in his thoughts, I see his greatness, only in his actions, in his life."
Read quote
35 likes
"The river has taught me to listen; you will learn from it, too. The river knows everything; one can learn everything from it. You have already learned from the river that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek the depths."
Read quote
35 likes
"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."
Read quote
35 likes
"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."
Read quote
34 likes
"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."
Read quote
32 likes
"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."
Read quote
32 likes
"The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure."
Read quote
31 likes
"I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray that finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him."
Read quote
31 likes
"What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world."
Read quote
30 likes
"You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else."
Read quote
30 likes
"You can ride, you can travel with a friend of your own; The final step you must take alone. No wisdom is better than this when known: That every hard thing is done alone."
Read quote
30 likes
"I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace."
Read quote
30 likes
"At the first kiss I felt something melt inside me that hurt in an exquisite way. All my longings, all my dreams and sweet anguish, all the secrets that slept deep within me came awake, everything was transformed and enchanted, and everything made sense."
Read quote
29 likes
"Man designs for himself a garden with a hundred kinds of trees, a thousand kinds of flowers, a hundred kinds of fruit and vegetables. Suppose, then, that the gardener of this garden knew no other distinction between edible and inedible, nine-tenths of this garden would be useless to him. He would pull up the most enchanting flowers and hew down the noblest trees and even regard them with a loathing and envious eye. This is what the Steppenwolf does with the thousand flowers of his soul. What does not stand classified as either man or wolf he does not see at all."
Read quote
29 likes
"Thus Gotama [Buddha] walked toward the town to gather alms, and the two samanas recognized him solely by the perfection of his repose, by the calmness of his figure, in which there was no trace of seeking, desiring, imitating, or striving, only light and peace"
Read quote
28 likes
"Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists of putting too high a value on time. In eternity there is no time. Eternity is a moment, just long enough for a joke"
Read quote
27 likes
"When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane."
Read quote
27 likes