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He has robbed me, yet he has given me something of greater value . . . he has given to me myself.

Hermann Hesse

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Hermann Hesse
Age: 85 †
Born: 1877
Born: July 2
Died: 1962
Died: August 9
Illustrator
Literary
Novelist
Painter
Philosopher
Poet
Resistance Fighter
Writer
Hermann Karl Hesse
Siddhartha
Robbed
Value
Greater
Values
Given
Something

More quotes by Hermann Hesse

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I felt knowledge and the unity of the world circulate in me like my own blood.
Hermann Hesse
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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
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...and gradually his face assumed the expressions which are so often found among rich people - the expressions of discontent, of sickliness, of displeasure, of idleness, of lovelessness. Slowly the soul sickness of the rich crept over him.
Hermann Hesse
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Things are going downhill with you!' he said to himself, and laughed about it, and as he was saying it, he happened to glance at the river, and he also saw the river going downhill, always moving on downhill, and singing and being happy through it all.
Hermann Hesse
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Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain-that it may perhaps be this is not important-but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the small from the same stream, from the same law of cause, of becoming and dying.
Hermann Hesse
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What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life
Hermann Hesse
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For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche.
Hermann Hesse
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The mind is international and supra-national ... it ought to serve not war and annihilation, but peace and reconciliation.
Hermann Hesse
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But your questions, which are unanswerable without exception, all spring from the same erroneous thinking.
Hermann Hesse
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An enlightened man had but one duty - to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led.
Hermann Hesse
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Were not the gods forms created like me and you, mortal, transient?
Hermann Hesse
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How foolish to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence.
Hermann Hesse
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Everything that was not suffered to the end and finally concluded, recurred, and the same sorrows were undergone.
Hermann Hesse
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If my life were not a dangerous, painful experiment, if I did not constantly skirt the abyss and feel the void under my feet, my life would have no meaning and I would not have been able to write anything.
Hermann Hesse
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It was the first rent in the holy image of my father, it was the first fissure in the columns that had upheld my childhood, which every individual must destroy before he can become himself.
Hermann Hesse
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The opposite of every truth is just as true.
Hermann Hesse
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Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence
Hermann Hesse
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I was out of my bed in one second, trembling with excitement, and I dashed to the door and into the adjoining room, where I could watch the streets below from the windows.
Hermann Hesse
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Like one who has eaten and drunk too much and vomits painfully and then feels better, so did the restless man wish he could rid himself with one terrific heave of these pleasures, of these habits of this entirely senseless life.
Hermann Hesse
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It was all a lie, it all stank, stank of lies, it all gave the illusion of meaning and happiness and beauty, and all of it was just putrefaction that no one would admit to. Bitter was the taste of the world. Life was a torment.
Hermann Hesse