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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.

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
Merely
Everyone
Spirit
Two
Doe
Poles
Body
Sinner
Life
Thousands
Saint

More quotes by Hermann Hesse

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When the suffering becomes acute enough, one goes forward.
Hermann Hesse
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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.
Hermann Hesse
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What we can and should change is ourselves: our impatience, our egoism (including intellectual egoism), our sense of injury, our lack of love and forbearance. I regard every other attempt to change the world, even if it springs from the best intentions, as futile.
Hermann Hesse
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I was given the freedom to discover my own inclination and talents, to fashion my inmost pleasures and sorrows myself and to regard the future not as an alien higher power but as the hope and product of my own strength.
Hermann Hesse
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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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Om is the bow, the arrow is soul.
Hermann Hesse
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I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.
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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For the air of lonely men surrounded him now, a still atmosphere in which the world around him slipped away, leaving him incapable of relationship, an atmosphere against which neither will nor longing availed. This was one of the significant earmarks of his life.
Hermann Hesse
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The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life.
Hermann Hesse
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Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can - that is their secret.
Hermann Hesse
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That is why we were drawn to one another and why we are brother and sister. I am going to teach you to dance and play and smile, and still not be happy. And you are going to teach me to think and to know and yet not be happy. Do you know that we are both children of the Devil?
Hermann Hesse
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To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.
Hermann Hesse
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Fortunately, like most children, I had learned what is most valuable, most indispensable for life before school years began, taught by apple trees, by rain and sun, river and woods.
Hermann Hesse
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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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Nevertheless, whether in occurrences lasting days, hours or mere minutes at a time, I have experienced happiness often, and have had brief encounters with it in my later years, even in old age.
Hermann Hesse
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Good that you ask. You should always ask, always have doubts.
Hermann Hesse
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Were not the gods forms created like me and you, mortal, transient?
Hermann Hesse
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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.
Hermann Hesse
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... let us recall the well-known statement of a university professor in the Republic of the Massagetes: 'Not the faculty but His Excellency the General can properly determine the sum of two and two.'
Hermann Hesse