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For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.

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
Hated
Cursed
Comfort
Prosperous
Middle
Mediocrity
Class
Contentment
Always
Classes
Things
Carefully
Detested
Fats
Brood
Optimism
Preserved

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My goal is this: always to put myself in the place in which I am best able to serve, wherever my gifts and qualities find the best soil to grow, the widest field of action. There is no other goal.
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The truth is lived, not taught.
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Every important cultural gesture comes down to a morality, a model for human behavior concentrated into a gesture.
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All this had always been and he had never seen it he was never present. Now he was present and belonged to it. Through his eyes he saw light and shadows through his mind he was aware of moon and stars.
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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.
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What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life
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When all the Self was conquered and dead, when all passions and desires were silent, then the last must awaken, the innermost of Being that is no longer Self - the great secret!
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My real self wanders elsewhere, far away, wanders on and on invisibly and has nothing to do with my life.
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Once you are able to make your request in such a way that you will be quite certain of its fulfillment, then the fulfillment will come.
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People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.
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I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.
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Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long.
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One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too.
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There is a miracle in every new beginning
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Only the ideas that we really live have any value.
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All the women of this fevered night, all that I had danced with, all whom I had kindled or who have kindled me, all whom I had courted, all who had clung to me with longing, all whom I had followed with enraptured eyes were melted together and had become one, the one whom I held in my arms.
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The mind is international and supra-national ... it ought to serve not war and annihilation, but peace and reconciliation.
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Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
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Was it not his Self, his small, fearful and proud Self, with which he had wrestled for so many years, but which had always conquered him again, which appeared each time again and again, which robbed him of happiness and filled him with fear?
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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.
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