top of page
Exlpore more Death quotes

"You are whatever you shall leave behind when you leave life!"

"Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange."

"Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six."

"Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you."
Explore more quotes by Hermann Hesse

"To deal with history [life] means to abandon one's self to chaos but to retain a belief in the ordination and the meaning. It is a very serious task."

"It was fortunate that love did not need words, or else it would be full of misunderstanding and foolishness."

"... it would be better for our country and the world in general, if at least the few people who were capable of thought stood for reason and the love of peace instead of heading wildly with blind obsession for new war."

"What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale."

"Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself....His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness."

"That is just what life is when it is beautiful and happy - a game! Naturally, one can also do all kinds of other things with it, make a duty of it, or a battleground, or a prison, but that does not make it any prettier."

"For awakened human beings, there was no obligation-none, none, none at all-except this: to search for yourself, become sure of yourself, feel your way forward along your own path, wherever it led."

"His way had therefore come full circle, or rather had taken the form of an ellipse or a spiral, following as ever no straight unbroken line, for the rectilinear belongs only to Geometry and not to Nature and Life."

"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."
bottom of page