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Only the ideas that we really live have any value.
Hermann Hesse -
I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference.
Hermann Hesse
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He lost his Self a thousand times and for days on end he dwelt in non-being. But although the paths took him away from Self, in the end they always led back to it. Although Siddhartha fled from the Self a thousand times, dwelt in nothing, dwelt in animal and stone, the return was inevitable; the hour was inevitable when he would again find himself in sunshine or in moonlight, in shadow or in rain, and was again Self and Siddhartha, again felt the torment of the onerous life cycle.
Hermann Hesse -
You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.
Hermann Hesse -
One can beg, buy, be presented with and find love in the streets, but it can never be stolen.
Hermann Hesse -
Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.
Hermann Hesse -
Your soul is the whole world.
Hermann Hesse -
The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.
Hermann Hesse
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All interpretation, all psychology, all attempts to make things comprehensible, require the medium of theories, mythologies, and lies.
Hermann Hesse -
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.
Hermann Hesse -
If I were poet now, I would not resist the temptation to trace my life back through the delicate shadows of my childhood to the precious and sheltered sources of my earliest memories. But these possessions are far too dear and sacred for the person I now am to spoil for myself. All there is to say of my childhood is that it was good and happy. I was given the freedom to discover my own inclinations 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.
Hermann Hesse -
The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.
Hermann Hesse -
Love must not entreat,' she added, 'or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract.
Hermann Hesse -
He saw mankind going through life in a childlike manner... which he loved but also despised.... He saw them toiling, saw them suffering, and becoming gray for the sake of things which seemed to him to be entirely unworthy of this price, for money, for little pleasures, for being slightly honoured.
Hermann Hesse
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The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. The God's name is Abraxas.
Hermann Hesse -
For a while I shall still be leaving, looking back at you as you slip away into the magic islands of the mind. But for a while now all are alive, believing that in a single poignant hour we did say all that we could ever say in a great flowing out of radiant power. It was like seeing and then going blind.
Hermann Hesse -
Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader.
Hermann Hesse -
Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.
Hermann Hesse -
A home isn't just a roof over our heads. A home is a place where we feel loved and where we love others. It's a place we belong. Love is what makes a home, not the contents inside the house or the number on the door. It's the people waiting for us across the threshold, the people who will take us in their arms after a ad day and kiss us good night and good morning everyday for the rest of our lives.
Hermann Hesse -
One of the aphorisms occurred to me now and I wrote it under the picture: "Fate and temperament are two words for one and the same concept." That was clear to me now.
Hermann Hesse
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When a writer receives praise or blame, when he arouses sympathy or is ridiculed, when he is loved or rejected, it is not on the strength of his thoughts and dreams as a whole, but only of that infinitesimal part which has been able to make its way through the narrow channel of language and the equally narrow channel of the reader's understanding.
Hermann Hesse -
Every healthy person must have a goal in life and that life must have content.
Hermann Hesse -
If what matters in a person's existence is to accept the inevitable consciously, to taste the good and bad to the full and to make for oneself a more individual, unaccidental and inward destiny alongside one's external fate, then my life has been neither empty nor worthless.
Hermann Hesse -
Every experience has its element of magic.
Hermann Hesse