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It was all a lie, it all stank, stank of lies, it all gave the illusion of meaning and happiness and beauty, and all of it was just putrefaction that no one would admit to. Bitter was the taste of the world. Life was a torment.

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
Meaning
Stank
Taste
Putrefaction
Beauty
Torment
Lying
Admit
Happiness
Bitter
Would
Illusion
Life
Gave
World
Lies

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Faith and doubt go hand in hand, they are complementaries. One who never doubts will never truly believe.
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I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back.
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All this had always been and he had never seen it he was never present. Now he was present and belonged to it. Through his eyes he saw light and shadows through his mind he was aware of moon and stars.
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Art is the contemplation of the world in a state of grace.
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our friendship has no other purpose, no other reason, than to show you how utterly unlike me you are.
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Only the ideas that we really live have any value.
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When we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.
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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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You show the world as a complete, unbroken chain, an eternal chain, linked together by cause and effect.
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Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain-that it may perhaps be this is not important-but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the small from the same stream, from the same law of cause, of becoming and dying.
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One cannot apologize for something fundamental, and a child feels and knows this as well and as deeply as any sage.
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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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When the suffering becomes acute enough, one goes forward.
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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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We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral we have already climbed many steps.
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lucid and quiet his voice hovered above the listeners, like a light, like a starry sky.
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Art is contemplation of the world in a state of grace and imaginatively reflecting that subjective understanding.
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Everyone can reach his goal, if he can think, wait and fast.
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I felt knowledge and the unity of the world circulate in me like my own blood.
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