Hermann Hesse Quotes

To live alone is the fate of all great souls.

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves.

Give her not greatness. For great souls must stand Alone and lonely in this little world: Cleft rocks that show the great Creator's hand, Thither by earthquakes hurled.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what people think. This rule,equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Great men do not content us. It is their solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

Beware of those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone.

She remembered no one at all. She remembered one day thinking: I am alone. There is no I but I. She lived in the dark. She taught herself to walk in the light, though it was not easy.

In America we have only the bourgeoisie, and the love of the heroic is one of the few counterpoises available to us. In us the contempt for the heroic is only an extension of the perversion of the democratic principle that denies greatness and wants everyone to feel comfortable in his skin without having to suffer unpleasant comparisons. Students have not the slightest notion of what an achievement it is to free oneself from public guidance and find resources for guidance within oneself.

One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.

Alone.'Twas her destiny to be ever surrounded by others, yet ever alone.

I am not a joiner. Somewhere I once said that people join clubs now for the very reason they once carried them, a need for security. Maybe I'm alone more often than I should be, because I try to find security within myself.

Join the bold, the brazen, the unintimidated. Join not having excuses. Join the idea that fun is the source of all joy. Join the unwillingness to give up. Join doing things your way. Join not joining. Join that purpose is stronger than outcome. Join your gut. Join the constant challenge of seeking greatness. Join play. Join the hunger to find what makes you happy. Join karma and nature and the effect you have on your world. Join your philosophy. Join something bigger than you. Join what you believe.

And so I learned what solitude really was. It was raw material - awesome, malleable,older than men or worlds or water. And it was merciless - for it let a man become precisely what he alone made of himself.

When I was a teenager, I was trying to please people. I kept changing who I was to please the people I was with. And so once I just decided I wasn't going to do that anymore. I was going to live my life to please God. And so from that day to this, that's been my aim. Some people don't understand, but you can't please everybody anyway.

The greater the spirit, the more one is alone.

People like me, LB, the truly great ones ... we are always alone.

There’s a greatness in not caring what people think

The swan who goes on living in its parents' tree will die; this is why those who are beautiful and talented bear the burden of finding their own way in the world.

Solitude is the one place where we can gain freedom from the forces of society that will otherwise relentlessly mold us. Solitude requires relentless perseverance.

We are a species that has lost its way. Everything natural, every flower or tree, and every animal have important lessons to teach us if we would only stop, look, and listen.

You think that I am impoverishing myself withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society.

In the temple of his spirit, each man is alone.