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I learned through my body and soul that it was necessary for me to sin, that I needed lust, that I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world.
Hermann Hesse -
Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.
Hermann Hesse
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Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others.
Hermann Hesse -
You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves.
Hermann Hesse -
Theory is knowledge that doesn't work. Practice is when everything works and you don't know why.
Hermann Hesse -
She stood a moment before my eyes, clearly and painfully, loved and deeply woven into my destiny; then fell away again in a deep oblivion, at a half regretted distance.
Hermann Hesse -
How foolish to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence.
Hermann Hesse -
He had thought more than other men, and in matters of the intellect he had that calm objectivity, that certainty of thought and knowledge, such as only really intellectual men have, who have no axe to grind, who never wish to shine, or to talk others down, or to appear always in the right.
Hermann Hesse
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If a bell failed to ring, if a stove smoked, if a wheel on a machine stuck, you knew at once where to look and did so with alacrity; you found the defect and knew how to cure it. But the thing within you, the secret mainspring that alone gave meaning to life, the thing within us that alone is living, alone is capable of feeling pleasure and pain, of craving happiness and experiencing it- that was unknown. You knew nothing about that, nothing at all, and if the mainspring failed there was no cure. Wasn't it insane?
Hermann Hesse -
Making music together is the best way for two people to become friends.
Hermann Hesse -
Often it is the most deserving people who cannot help loving those who destroy them.
Hermann Hesse -
We have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.
Hermann Hesse -
I do want more. I am not content with being happy. I was not made for it. It is not my destiny. My destiny is the opposite.
Hermann Hesse -
...Haller's sickness of the soul, as I now know, is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs, a sickness, it seems, that by no means attacks the weak and worthless only but, rather, precisely those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts.
Hermann Hesse
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I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.
Hermann Hesse -
What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.
Hermann Hesse -
Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads. The ancient Asiatics knew this well enough, and in the Buddhist Yoga an exact technique was devised for unmasking the illusion of the personality. The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen.
Hermann Hesse -
Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.
Hermann Hesse -
We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.
Hermann Hesse -
A mere nothing suffices — and the lightning strikes.
Hermann Hesse
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Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak... surrender to them. Don't ask first whether it's permitted, or would please your teachers or father or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that.
Hermann Hesse -
All birth means separation from the All, the confinement within limitation, the separation from God, the pangs of being born ever anew. The return into the All, the dissolution of painful individuation, the reunion with God means the expansion of the soul until it is able once more to embrace the All.
Hermann Hesse -
Art is contemplation of the world in a state of grace and imaginatively reflecting that subjective understanding.
Hermann Hesse -
And what is called history at school, and all we learn by heart there about heroes and geniuses and great deeds and fine emotions, is all nothing but a swindle invented by the schoolmasters for educational reasons to keep children occupied for a given number of years. It has always been so and always will be.
Hermann Hesse