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Every important cultural gesture comes down to a morality, a model for human behavior concentrated into a gesture.

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
Important
Cultural
Every
Model
Models
Morality
Behavior
Comes
Concentrated
Human
Gesture
Humans
Gestures

More quotes by Hermann Hesse

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All higher humor begins with ceasing to take oneself seriously.
Hermann Hesse
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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.
Hermann Hesse
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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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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.
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Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence
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Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.
Hermann Hesse
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Until 1914 I loved to travel I often went to Italy and once spent a few months in India. Since then I have almost entirely abandoned travelling, and I have not been outside of Switzerland for over ten years.
Hermann Hesse
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Were not the gods forms created like me and you, mortal, transient?
Hermann Hesse
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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.
Hermann Hesse
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Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader.
Hermann Hesse
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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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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
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Good that you ask. You should always ask, always have doubts.
Hermann Hesse
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I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.
Hermann Hesse
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The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.
Hermann Hesse
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People know, or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the world of mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer's slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue.
Hermann Hesse
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Art is contemplation of the world in a state of grace and imaginatively reflecting that subjective understanding.
Hermann Hesse
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Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.
Hermann Hesse
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Opinions mean nothing they may be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can embrace or reject them.
Hermann Hesse
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The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people — eternal life.
Hermann Hesse