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So you can't dance? Not at all? Not even one step? How can you say that you've taken any trouble to live when you won't even dance?

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
Steps
Trouble
Taken
Live
Even
Dancing
Dance
Step

More quotes by 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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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.
Hermann Hesse
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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.
Hermann Hesse
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Without a mother, one cannot love. Without a mother, one cannot die.
Hermann Hesse
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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.
Hermann Hesse
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Not in his speech, not in his thoughts, I see his greatness, only in his actions, in his life.
Hermann Hesse
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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.
Hermann Hesse
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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.
Hermann Hesse
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Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.
Hermann Hesse
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...Haller's sickness of the soul, as I now know, is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs, a sickness, it seems, that by no means attacks the weak and worthless only but, rather, precisely those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts.
Hermann Hesse
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Once you are able to make your request in such a way that you will be quite certain of its fulfillment, then the fulfillment will come.
Hermann Hesse
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To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.
Hermann Hesse
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At the first kiss I felt something melt inside me that hurt in an exquisite way. All my longings, all my dreams and sweet anguish, all the secrets that slept deep within me came awake, everything was transformed and enchanted, and everything made sense.
Hermann Hesse
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So wie die Verruecktheit in einem hoeheren Sinn, der Anfang aller Weisheit ist, so ist die Schizophrenie der Anfang aller Kunst, aller Phantasie. (As insanity in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizophrenia the beginning of all art, all fantasy.)
Hermann Hesse
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To such men the desperate and horrible thought has come that perhaps the whole of human life is but a bad joke, a violent and ill-fated abortion of the primal mother, a savage and dismal catastophe of nature.
Hermann Hesse
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To nobody can you communicate in words and teachings, what happened to you in your hour of enlightenment.
Hermann Hesse
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A father can pass on his nose and eyes and even his intelligence to his child, but not his soul. In every human being the soul is new
Hermann Hesse
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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.
Hermann Hesse
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I learned through my body and soul that it was necessary for me to sin, that I needed lust, that I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world.
Hermann Hesse
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Let me say no more. Words do no justice to the hidden meaning. Everything immediately becomes slightly different when it is expressed in words, a little bit distorted, a little foolish...It is perfectly fine with me that what for one man is precious wisdom for another sounds like foolery.
Hermann Hesse