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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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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
Nothing
Eternal
Shallow
Good
Tomorrow
Mathematical
Time
Present
Treat
World
Law
Treats
Evil
Yesterday
History
Mathematics
Reality
Laws
Mathematician
Doe
Exist
Formulas

More quotes by Hermann Hesse

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Every important cultural gesture comes down to a morality, a model for human behavior concentrated into a gesture.
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When the suffering becomes acute enough, one goes forward.
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Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them.
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The truth is lived, not taught.
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Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader.
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The tree does not die, it waits.
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An enlightened man had but one duty - to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led.
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Your soul is the whole world.
Hermann Hesse
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What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.
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We create gods and struggle with them, and they bless us.
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And here is a doctrine at which you will laugh. It seems to me, Govinda, that love is the most important thing in the world.
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I, also, would like to look and smile, sit and walk like that, so free, so worthy, so restrained, so candid, so childlike and mysterious. A man only looks and walks like that when he has conquered his Self. I also will conquer my Self.
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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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The highest art... sets down its creations and trusts in their magic, without fear of not being understood.
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 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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If a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do.
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You show the world as a complete, unbroken chain, an eternal chain, linked together by cause and effect.
Hermann Hesse
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Each man carries the vestiges of his birth the slime and eggshells of his primeval past with him to the end of his days. Some never become human, remaining frog, lizard, ant. Some are human above the waist, fish below.
Hermann Hesse
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You're quite right there, he said. I have practiced abstinence myself for years, and had my time of fasting, too, but now I find myself once more beneath the sign of Aquarius, a dark and humid constellation.
Hermann Hesse