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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.

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
Melancholy
Mature
Disappointment
Began
Transfigure
Dignity
Cheapen
Suffering
Vex
Understand
Deprive
Disappointments

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Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can - that is their secret.
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Beautiful was this world, looking at it thus, without searching, thus simply, thus childlike.
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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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She stood a moment before my eyes, clearly and painfully, loved and deeply woven into my destiny then fell away again in a deep oblivion, at a half regretted distance.
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Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader.
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The bourgeois today burns as heretics and hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments tomorrow.
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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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Theory is knowledge that doesn't work. Practice is when everything works and you don't know why.
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How foolish to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence.
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All the books of the world full of thoughts and poems are nothing in comparison to a minute of sobbing, when feeling surges in waves, the soul feels itself profoundly and finds itself. Tears are the melting ice of snow. All angels are close to the crying person.
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Your soul is the whole world.
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A girl had bidden me eat and drink and sleep, and had shown me friendship and had laughed at me and had called me a silly little boy. And this wonderful friend had talked to me of the saints and shown me that even when I had outdone myself in absurdity I was not alone.
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In my brain were stored a thousand pictures.
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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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I have always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions.
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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.
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In the beginning was the myth.
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Truly, nothing in the world has so occupied my thoughts as this I, this riddle, the fact I am alive, that I am separated and isolated from all others, that I am Siddhartha! And about nothing in the world do I know less about than me, about Siddhartha!
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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.
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The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people — eternal life.
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