more Herman Hesse Quotes

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

"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!"

"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."

"You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live." (Steppenwolf)

"I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am responsible for what I do with the life I’ve got."

"Your soul is the whole world." (Siddhartha)

"Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try again and again to console my heart and pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell"

"How foolish it is to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence."

"It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard."

"Sentimentality is a basking in feelings that in reality you don't take seriously enough to make the slightest sacrifice to or ever translate into action."

"This day will never come again and anyone who fails to eat and drink and taste and smell it will never have it offered to him again in all eternity. The sun will never shine as it does today...But you must play your part and sing a song, one of your best."

"An enlightened man had but one duty - to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led." (Demian)

Herman Hesse