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

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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Youth ends when egotism does maturity begins when one lives for others.
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They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.
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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.
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Was it not his Self, his small, fearful and proud Self, with which he had wrestled for so many years, but which had always conquered him again, which appeared each time again and again, which robbed him of happiness and filled him with fear?
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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.
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There is a miracle in every new beginning
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One cannot apologize for something fundamental, and a child feels and knows this as well and as deeply as any sage.
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The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.
Hermann Hesse
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a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful.
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Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader.
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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.
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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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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.
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Chaos demands to be recognized and experienced before letting itself be converted into a new order.
Hermann Hesse
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I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.
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There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge - that is everywhere.
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.
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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.
Hermann Hesse