Hermann Hesse Quotes
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For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers.
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A thousand times I was ready to regret and take back my rash statement - yet it had been the truth.
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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.
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Opinions mean nothing; they may be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can embrace or reject them.
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It is good to taste for yourself everything you need to know. That worldly pleasures and wealth are not good things, I learned even as a child. I knew it for a long time, but only now have I experienced it.
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One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.
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In any case, the most lively young people become the best old people, not those who pretend to be as wise as grandfathers while they are still at school.
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How beautiful the world was when one looked at it, without searching... just looked, simply and innocently.
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We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.
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How absurd these words are, such as beast and beast of prey. One should not speak of animals in that way. They may be terrible sometimes, but they're much more right than men...They're never in any embarrassment. They always know what to do and how to behave themselves. They don't flatter and they don't intrude. They don't pretend. They are as they are, like stones or flowers or stars in the sky.
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Our friendship has no other purpose, no other reason, than to show you how utterly unlike me you are.
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Yes, what we are doing is probably mad, and probably it is good and necessary all the same. It is not a good thing when man overstrains his reason and tries to reduce to rational order matters that are susceptible of rational treatment. Then there arise ideals such as those of the Americans or of the Bolsheviks. Both are extraordinarily rational, and both lead to a frightful oppression and impoverishment of life, because they simplify it so crudely. The likeness of man, once a high ideal, is in process of becoming a machine-made article. It is for madmen like us, perhaps, to ennoble it again.
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I was given the freedom to discover my own inclination and talents, to fashion my inmost pleasures and sorrows myself and to regard the future not as an alien higher power but as the hope and product of my own strength.
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All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?
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To nobody can you communicate in words and teachings, what happened to you in your hour of enlightenment.
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You must find your dream, then the way becomes easy.
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Love of God is not always the same as love of good.
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What is meditation?... It is fleeing from the self, it is a short escape of the agony of being a self, it is a short numbing of the senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life. The same escape, the same short numbing is what the driver of an ox-cart finds in the inn, drinking a few bowls of rice wine or fermented coconut-milk.
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Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.
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Faith is stronger than so-called reality.
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A person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful.
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He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships become newly born. Each one was mortal, a passionate, painful example of all that is transitory. Yet none of them died, they only changed, were always reborn, continually had a new face: only time stood between one face and another.
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All suicides have the responsibility of fighting against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be conquered by life than to fall by one's own hand.
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He was taught by the river. Incessantly, he learned from it. Most of all, he learned from it to listen, to pay close attention with a quiet heart, with a waiting, opened soul, without passion, without a wish, without judgement, without an opinion.