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Each of us is merely one human being, merely an experiment, a way station. But each of us should be on the way toward perfection, should be striving to reach the center, not the periphery.

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
Human
Stations
Humans
Experiments
Way
Center
Strive
Perfection
Periphery
Merely
Station
Reach
Striving
Toward
Experiment

More quotes by 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.
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If a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do.
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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.
Hermann Hesse
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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.
Hermann Hesse
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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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All the women of this fevered night, all that I had danced with, all whom I had kindled or who have kindled me, all whom I had courted, all who had clung to me with longing, all whom I had followed with enraptured eyes were melted together and had become one, the one whom I held in my arms.
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Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.
Hermann Hesse
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Faith and doubt go hand in hand, they are complementaries. One who never doubts will never truly believe.
Hermann Hesse
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When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at 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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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
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How foolish to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence.
Hermann Hesse
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Some of us think holding on makes us strong but sometimes it is letting go.
Hermann Hesse
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The bourgeois today burns as heretics and hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments tomorrow.
Hermann Hesse
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Every important cultural gesture comes down to a morality, a model for human behavior concentrated into a gesture.
Hermann Hesse
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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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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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What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life
Hermann Hesse
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Art is contemplation of the world in a state of grace and imaginatively reflecting that subjective understanding.
Hermann Hesse
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The true profession of a man is to find his way to himself.
Hermann Hesse