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

More quotes by 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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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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My real self wanders elsewhere, far away, wanders on and on invisibly and has nothing to do with my life.
Hermann Hesse
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People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.
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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Your soul is the whole world.
Hermann Hesse
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And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life.
Hermann Hesse
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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.
Hermann Hesse
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I, also, would like to look and smile, sit and walk like that, so free, so worthy, so restrained, so candid, so childlike and mysterious. A man only looks and walks like that when he has conquered his Self. I also will conquer my Self.
Hermann Hesse
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If my life were not a dangerous, painful experiment, if I did not constantly skirt the abyss and feel the void under my feet, my life would have no meaning and I would not have been able to write anything.
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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Only the ideas that we really live have any value.
Hermann Hesse
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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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Everything that was not suffered to the end and finally concluded, recurred, and the same sorrows were undergone.
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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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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I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am responsible for what I do with the life I've got.
Hermann Hesse
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Good that you ask. You should always ask, always have doubts.
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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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