Hermann Hesse Quotes
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The voices of all creatures are in the voices of the river.
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A girl had bidden me eat and drink and sleep, and had shown me friendship and had laughed at me and had called me a silly little boy. And this wonderful friend had talked to me of the saints and shown me that even when I had outdone myself in absurdity I was not alone.
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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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Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
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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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A person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful.
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At that time two opposing concepts of the Game called forth commentary and discussion. The foremost players distinguished two principal types of Game, the formal and the psychological.
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The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.
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The opposite of every truth is just as true.
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Gratitude is not a virtue I believe in, and to me it seems hypocritical to expect it from a child.
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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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Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence.
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What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.
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The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life.
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All the books of the world full of thoughts and poems are nothing in comparison to a minute of sobbing, when feeling surges in waves, the soul feels itself profoundly and finds itself. Tears are the melting ice of snow. All angels are close to the crying person.
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Life is waiting everywhere, the future is flowering everywhere, but we only see a small part of it and step on much of it with our feet.
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Siddhartha stopped fighting his fate this very hour, and he stopped suffering.
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You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality. That is the prison where you lie.
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That life is difficult, I have often bitterly realized.
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I hope death will be a great happiness, a happiness as great as that of love, fulfilled love.
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One must find the source within one's own Self, one must possess it. Everything else was seeking -- a detour, an error.
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You must find your dream...but no dream lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular dream.
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But one thing this doctrine, so clean, so venerable, does not contain: it does nto contain the secret of what the Sublime One himself experienced, he alone among the hundreds of thousands. This is why I am continuing my wanderings not to seek another, better doctrine, because I know there is none, but to leave behind all the teachings and all teachers, and either attain my goal alone or die.
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What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world.