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I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself that beast astray that finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.

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
Home
Beast
World
Finds
Neither
Joy
Strange
Call
Astray
Often
Incomprehensible
Truth
Nourishment

More quotes by Hermann Hesse

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Age is a state of mind. Youth and age exist only among the ordinary people. All the more talented and exceptional of us are sometimes old, just as we are sometimes happy, and sometimes sad.
Hermann Hesse
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Whither will my path yet lead me? This path is stupid, it goes in spirals, perhaps in circles, but whichever way it goes, I will follow it.
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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Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.
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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You are only afriad if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them!
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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To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.
Hermann Hesse
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But peace, too, is a living thing and like all life it must wax and wane, accommodate, withstand trials, and undergo changes.
Hermann Hesse
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I believe that the struggle against death, the unconditional and self-willed determination to live, is the mode of power behind the lives and activities of all outstanding men.
Hermann Hesse
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The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life.
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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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.
Hermann Hesse
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Like one who has eaten and drunk too much and vomits painfully and then feels better, so did the restless man wish he could rid himself with one terrific heave of these pleasures, of these habits of this entirely senseless life.
Hermann Hesse
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I was out of my bed in one second, trembling with excitement, and I dashed to the door and into the adjoining room, where I could watch the streets below from the windows.
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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What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life
Hermann Hesse
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Not in his speech, not in his thoughts, I see his greatness, only in his actions, in his life.
Hermann Hesse
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I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back.
Hermann Hesse
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I hope death will be a great happiness, a happiness as great as that of love, fulfilled love
Hermann Hesse