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

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A tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me!... Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
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So you find yourself surrounded by death and horror in the world, and you escape it into lust. But lust has no duration it leaves you again in the desert.
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How could I fail to be a lone wolf, and an uncouth hermit, as I did not share one of its aims nor understand one of its pleasures?
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Some of us think holding on makes us strong but sometimes it is letting go.
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A father can pass on his nose and eyes and even his intelligence to his child, but not his soul. In every human being the soul is new
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Everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my loving understanding then all is well with me and nothing can harm me.
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The cup was emptied and would never be filled again.
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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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It was morning through the high window I saw the pure, bright blue of the sky as it hovered cheerfully over the long roofs of the neighboring houses. It too seemed full of joy, as if it had special plans, and had put on its finest clothes for the occasion.
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Most people...are like a falling leaf that drifts and turns in the air, flutters, and falls to the ground. But a few others are like stars which travel one defined path: no wind reaches them, they have within themselves their guide and path.
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A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to committ outrages.
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What is meditation?... It is fleeing from the self, it is a short escape of the agony of being a self, it is a short numbing of the senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life. The same escape, the same short numbing is what the driver of an ox-cart finds in the inn, drinking a few bowls of rice wine or fermented coconut-milk.
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You show the world as a complete, unbroken chain, an eternal chain, linked together by cause and effect.
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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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lucid and quiet his voice hovered above the listeners, like a light, like a starry sky.
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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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Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.
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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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