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It is good to taste for yourself everything you need to know. That worldly pleasures and wealth are not good things, I learned even as a child. I knew it for a long time, but only now have I experienced it.

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
Things
Everything
Taste
Time
Need
Wealth
Children
Learned
Needs
Knew
Worldly
Even
Pleasure
Pleasures
Heart
Child
Stomach
Long
Eye
Experienced
Good
Remember
Hearing

More quotes by Hermann Hesse

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Art is the contemplation of the world in a state of grace.
Hermann Hesse
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So wie die Verruecktheit in einem hoeheren Sinn, der Anfang aller Weisheit ist, so ist die Schizophrenie der Anfang aller Kunst, aller Phantasie. (As insanity in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizophrenia the beginning of all art, all fantasy.)
Hermann Hesse
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One cannot apologize for something fundamental, and a child feels and knows this as well and as deeply as any sage.
Hermann Hesse
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The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.
Hermann Hesse
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Without a mother, one cannot love. Without a mother, one cannot die.
Hermann Hesse
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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.
Hermann Hesse
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Gratitude is not a virtue I believe in, and to me it seems hypocritical to expect it from a child.
Hermann Hesse
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What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you're searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don't find the time for finding?
Hermann Hesse
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In the beginning was the myth.
Hermann Hesse
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And what is called history at school, and all we learn by heart there about heroes and geniuses and great deeds and fine emotions, is all nothing but a swindle invented by the schoolmasters for educational reasons to keep children occupied for a given number of years. It has always been so and always will be.
Hermann Hesse
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I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back.
Hermann Hesse
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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!
Hermann Hesse
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In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified.
Hermann Hesse
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At one time I had given much thought to why men were so very rarely capable of living for an ideal. Now I saw that many, no, all men were capable of dying for one.
Hermann Hesse
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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.
Hermann Hesse
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I sped through heaven and saw god at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defenses and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart.
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
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You're quite right there, he said. I have practiced abstinence myself for years, and had my time of fasting, too, but now I find myself once more beneath the sign of Aquarius, a dark and humid constellation.
Hermann Hesse
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You wouldn't consider all the bipeds you pass on the street human beings simply because they walk upright and carry their young in their bellies nine months! It is obvious how many of them are fish or sheep, worms or angels, how many are ants, how many are bees!
Hermann Hesse
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Truly, nothing in the world has so occupied my thoughts as this I, this riddle, the fact I am alive, that I am separated and isolated from all others, that I am Siddhartha! And about nothing in the world do I know less about than me, about Siddhartha!
Hermann Hesse