Hermann Hesse
1877–1962 · 3 quotes
Hermann Hesse was a German-Swiss poet and novelist who lived from 1877 to 1962 and won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is known for books such as Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Narcissus and Goldmund, and The Glass Bead Game. His words are worth reading for their focus on authenticity, self-knowledge, spirituality, and ideas shaped by Eastern traditions and Jungian analysis.
Quotes by Hermann Hesse
Hermann Hesse's quote library gathers 3 published lines in one place. Themes include life, wisdom, inspiration, and funny.
Start with the selected quotes below, or use a theme link to filter this author inside the main quote collection.
“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. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.”
About Hermann Hesse
Hermann Karl Hesse was a German-Swiss poet and novelist, born on 2 July 1877 in Calw, a Black Forest town in Württemberg, then part of the German Empire. He died on 9 August 1962. During his lifetime he was widely read in German-speaking countries, and in 1946 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. His wider international audience grew a few years after his death, when his books became enormously popular in the mid-1960s among post-World War II generation readers in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere.
Hesse is best known for novels including Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Narcissus and Goldmund, and The Glass Bead Game. These books explore an individual’s search for authenticity, self-knowledge, and spirituality. That concern was not separate from Hesse’s own life. His literary work was shaped by an interest in Eastern religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions, as well as by his involvement with Jungian analysis.
His family background gave him a broad and complicated sense of the world. Hesse’s grandparents served in India with the Basel Mission, a Protestant Christian missionary society. His grandfather Hermann Gundert compiled a Malayalam grammar and a Malayalam-English dictionary, and contributed to a translation of the Bible into Malayalam in South India. Hesse’s mother, Marie Gundert, was born at such a mission in South India; his father, Johannes Hesse, was born in Weissenstein in the Russian Empire, now Paide, Estonia. At birth, Hermann was a dual citizen of the German Empire and the Russian Empire.
Hesse grew up in a Swabian Pietist household, in a family closely tied to religious publishing, theological texts, and schoolbooks. His grandfather’s library, filled with works of world literature, encouraged him to read widely and helped give him what he described as a sense of being a citizen of the world. He later wrote that his family background became “the basis of an isolation and a resistance to any sort of nationalism that so defined my life.” Music and poetry mattered at home, too. His mother wrote poetry, his father was known for his use of language, and by 1889–90 Hesse had decided that he wanted to be a writer.
His early years also carried strain. From childhood he was headstrong, and he showed signs of serious depression as early as his first year at school. After entering the Evangelical Theological Seminary of Maulbronn Abbey in 1891, he first did well, especially enjoying essays and translating classical Greek poetry into German. But in 1892 he entered a serious personal crisis, fled the seminary, and after an attempt at suicide spent time in institutions and other schools. Such experiences help explain why his fiction returns so often to inner conflict, self-knowledge, and the demand that life be tested in action. One of his quoted lines says, “I do not see his greatness in his speech or his thoughts; I see it only in his actions, in his life.” For many readers, that still sounds like Hesse at his clearest: measuring ideas by the life that carries them.
Source: Wikipedia · Photo: Wikimedia Commons