Hermann Hesse Quotes
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To recognize causes is to think, and through thought alone feelings become knowledge and are not lost, but become real and begin to mature.
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Without a mother, one cannot love. Without a mother, one cannot die.
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Every experience has its element of magic.
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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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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.
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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.
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All men of goodwill have this in common - that our works put us to shame.
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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.
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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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Love is stronger than violence.
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Everyone can reach his goal, if he can think, wait and fast.
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Siddhartha has one single goal-to become empty, to become empty of thirst, desire, dreams, pleasure and sorrow-to let the Self die. No longer to be Self, to experience the peace of an emptied heart, to experience pure thought-that was his goal.
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Fortunately, like most children, I had learned what is most valuable, most indispensable for life before school years began, taught by apple trees, by rain and sun, river and woods.
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It is a pity that you students aren't fully aware of the luxury and abundance in which you live.
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I have always been a great dreamer; in dreams I am more active than in my real life, and these shadows sapped me of health and energy.
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As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.
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I have known it for a long time but I have only just experienced it. Now I know it not only with my intellect, but with my eyes, with my heart, with my stomach.
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For the first time in my life I tasted death, and death tasted bitter, for death is birth, is fear and dread of some terrible renewal.
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Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.
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Is not every life, every work fine?
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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.
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I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.
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Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader.
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What for me is bliss and life and ecstasy and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in life it finds it absurd.