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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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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
Live
Determination
Self
Activity
Believe
Behinds
Men
Behind
Willed
Struggle
Outstanding
Lives
Mode
Death
Unconditional
Power
Activities

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There is a miracle in every new beginning
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Beautiful was this world, looking at it thus, without searching, thus simply, thus childlike.
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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.
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The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted yes almost arrogant. You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine's Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world's puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies.
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I shall no longer be instructed by the Yoga Veda or the Aharva Veda, or the ascetics, or any other doctrine whatsoever. I shall learn from myself, be a pupil of myself I shall get to know myself, the mystery of Siddhartha. He looked around as if he were seeing the world for the first time.
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The art of love-giving and taking become one.
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The cup was emptied and would never be filled again.
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Chaos demands to be recognized and experienced before letting itself be converted into a new order.
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A soul that is ruined in the bud will frequently return to the springtime of its beginning and its promise-filled childhood, as though it could discover new hopes there and retie the broken threads of life. The shoots grow rapidly and eagerly, but it is only a sham life that will never be a genuine tree.
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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.
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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.
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The opposite of every truth is just as true.
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All birth means separation from the All, the confinement within limitation, the separation from God, the pangs of being born ever anew. The return into the All, the dissolution of painful individuation, the reunion with God means the expansion of the soul until it is able once more to embrace the All.
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Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.
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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.
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In my brain were stored a thousand pictures.
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I have always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions.
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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.
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I sped through heaven and saw god at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defenses and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart.
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Our god's name is Abraxas and he is God and Satan and he contains both the luminous and the dark world.
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