These 10 Noble Quotes from Hermann Hesse celebrate the life of a man who was a poet, author and painter. He is probably best known for his novels Siddhartha and Steppenwolf books which explore an individual’s search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality.
Hesse was born on the 2nd of July 1877 in the Black Forest town of Calw in Württemberg, which was in the then German Empire. He grew up in a Swabian Pietist household, with the Pietist tendency to insulate believers into small, deeply thoughtful groups and this influenced his writing style in later life.
A Nobel prize winner, his life was one spent as a proponent of the politics of detachment, a passive hater of the Nazi regime and a determined opponent of Hitler’s suppression of art and literature that protested Nazi ideology. After completing his final novel, The Glass Bead Game he wrote a large number of short stories and was an avid letter writer, reflecting in his final months that he’d never succeeded in his pursuit of a talent for idleness. He died aged 85 on 9 August 1962, and was buried in the cemetery at San Abbondio in Montagnola.
“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.”
“Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.”
“Some of us think holding on makes us strong but sometimes it is letting go.”
“Oh, love isn’t there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.”
“We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.”
“When you like someone, you like them in spite of their faults. When you love someone, you love them with their faults.”
“People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.”
“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.”
“Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others.”
“. . . gentleness is stronger than severity, water is stronger than rock, love is stronger than force.”
I think you will agree that Hermann was a very deep thinking man. If you fancy looking through his bibliography, the links are below.
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