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It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone.

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
Alone
Spurn
Choices
Siddhartha
Another
Purely
Must
Judge
Men
Humility
Life
Judging
Choose
Focus

More quotes by 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.
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Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.
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In the beginning was the myth.
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I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.
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What is meditation?... It is fleeing from the self, it is a short escape of the agony of being a self, it is a short numbing of the senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life. The same escape, the same short numbing is what the driver of an ox-cart finds in the inn, drinking a few bowls of rice wine or fermented coconut-milk.
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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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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.
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What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world.
Hermann Hesse
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A mere nothing suffices — and the lightning strikes.
Hermann Hesse
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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.
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 die is to go into the Collective Unconscious, to lose oneself in order to be transformed into form, pure form.
Hermann Hesse
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I have always been a great dreamer in dreams I am more active than in my real life, and these shadows sapped me of health and energy.
Hermann Hesse
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Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
Hermann Hesse
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The bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self.... And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation andsecurity. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire.
Hermann Hesse
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Love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is only your aversion to it that hurts, nothing else.
Hermann Hesse
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Those who direct the maximum force of their desires toward the center, toward true being, toward perfection, seem quieter than the passionate souls because the flame of their fervor cannot always be seen.
Hermann Hesse
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In fear I hurried this way and that. I had the taste of blood and chocolate in my mouth, the one as hateful as the other.
Hermann Hesse
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Beauty does not bring happiness to the one who possesses it, but to the one who loves and admires it.
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