Hermann Hesse Quotes

Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader.

You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves.

In every truth, the opposite is equally true. For example, a truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is onesided.

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. The God’s name is Abraxas.

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

Passion is always a mystery and unaccountable, and unfortunately there is no doubt that life does not spare its purest children; often it is just the most deserving people who cannot help loving those that destroy them.

Madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom.

There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.

The river is everywhere.

Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism.