Quote

I learned through my body and soul that it was necessary for me to sin, that I needed lust, that I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world.

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
World
Vision
Strive
Nausea
Learn
Despair
Depths
Experience
Perfection
Resist
Order
Property
Imaginary
Body
Sin
Lust
Soul
Necessary
Compare
Kind
Needed
Depth
Love
Learned
Glad

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Chaos demands to be recognized and experienced before letting itself be converted into a new order.
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lucid and quiet his voice hovered above the listeners, like a light, like a starry sky.
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Opinions mean nothing they may be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can embrace or reject them.
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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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Romantic souvenirs had a way of attaching themselves to one when one wanted to move on, but they were not to be taken seriously.
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I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back.
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Happiness is love, nothing else. A man who is capable of love is happy.
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Art is contemplation of the world in a state of grace and imaginatively reflecting that subjective understanding.
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Slowly blossomed, slowly ripened in Siddhartha the realisation, the knowledge, what wisdom actually was, what the goal of his long search was. It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, an ability, a secret art, to think every moment, while living his life, the thought of oneness, to be able to feel and inhale the oneness.
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There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.
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His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands and thousands.
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Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists of putting too high a value on time. In eternity there is no time. Eternity is a moment, just long enough for a joke
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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.
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And here is a doctrine at which you will laugh. It seems to me, Govinda, that love is the most important thing in the world.
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The opposite of every truth is just as true.
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You knew all along that your sanctioned world was only half the world, and you tried to suppress the other half the same way the priests and teachers do. You won't succeed. No one succeeds in this once he has begun to think.
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I suddenly saw how sad and artificial my life had been during this period, for the loves, friends, habits and pleasures of these years were discarded like badly fitting clothes. I parted from them without pain and all that remained was to wonder that I could have endured them so long.
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People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest. It was a scandal that a breed of fearless and sinister people ran around freely, so they attached a nickname and a myth to these people to get even with them, to make up for the many times they had felt afraid.
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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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Siddhartha stopped fighting his fate this very hour, and he stopped suffering.
Hermann Hesse