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I suddenly saw how sad and artificial my life had been during this period, for the loves, friends, habits and pleasures of these years were discarded like badly fitting clothes. I parted from them without pain and all that remained was to wonder that I could have endured them so long.

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
Pain
Loves
Remained
Without
Periods
Fitting
Long
Saws
Pleasures
Years
Habit
Badly
Life
Clothes
Artificial
Like
Wonder
Habits
Parted
Pleasure
Suddenly
Discarded
Friends
Period
Endured

More quotes by Hermann Hesse

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lucid and quiet his voice hovered above the listeners, like a light, like a starry sky.
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I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.
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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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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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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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The river is everywhere at the same time . . . everywhere and the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future.
Hermann Hesse
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It was the first rent in the holy image of my father, it was the first fissure in the columns that had upheld my childhood, which every individual must destroy before he can become himself.
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A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to committ outrages.
Hermann Hesse
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I shall begin my story with an experience I had when I was ten and attended our small town's Latin school.
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Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.
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.
Hermann Hesse
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How foolish to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence.
Hermann Hesse
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The world, Govinda my friend, is not imperfect, not to be seen as on a slow path toward perfection: No, it is perfect in every moment, all transgression already bears grace within itself, all little children already have the aged in themselves, all the sucklings death, all the dying eternal life.
Hermann Hesse
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Theory is knowledge that doesn't work. Practice is when everything works and you don't know why.
Hermann Hesse
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That life is difficult, I have often bitterly realized.
Hermann Hesse
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I hope death will be a great happiness, a happiness as great as that of love, fulfilled love
Hermann Hesse
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So you find yourself surrounded by death and horror in the world, and you escape it into lust. But lust has no duration it leaves you again in the desert.
Hermann Hesse
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His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands and thousands.
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The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. The God's name is Abraxas.
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You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.
Hermann Hesse