Hermann Hesse Quotes.
When you like someone, you like them in spite of their faults. When you love someone, you love them with their faults.
Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.
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 for over ten years.
Wisdom is 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.
To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.
To be able to throw one’s self away for the sake of a moment, to be able to sacrifice years for a woman’s smile – that is happiness.
. . . gentleness is stronger than severity, water is stronger than rock, love is stronger than force.
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.
Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long.
This happiness consisted of nothing else but the harmony of the few things around me with my own existence, a feeling of contentment and well-being that needed no changes and no intensification.
Every experience has its element of magic.
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.
What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.
Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.
People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.
Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.
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.
