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The truth is lived, not taught.

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
Truth
Lived
Taught
Literature

More quotes by Hermann Hesse

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Our god's name is Abraxas and he is God and Satan and he contains both the luminous and the dark world.
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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A mere nothing suffices — and the lightning strikes.
Hermann Hesse
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He saw mankind going through life in a childlike manner... which he loved but also despised.... He saw them toiling, saw them suffering, and becoming gray for the sake of things which seemed to him to be entirely unworthy of this price, for money, for little pleasures, for being slightly honoured.
Hermann Hesse
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. . . gentleness is stronger than severity, water is stronger than rock, love is stronger than force.
Hermann Hesse
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No, a true seeker, one who truly wished to find, could accept no doctrine. But the man who has found what he sought, such a man could approve of every doctrine, each and every one, every path, every goal nothing separated him any longer from all those thousands of others who lived in the eternal, who breathed the Divine.
Hermann Hesse
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We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral we have already climbed many steps.
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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You learned people and artists have, no doubt, all sorts of superior things in your heads but you're human beings like the rest of us, and we, too, have our dreams and fancies.
Hermann Hesse
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Man's life seems to me like a long, weary night that would be intolerable if there were not occasionally flashes of light, the sudden brightness of which is so comforting and wonderful, that the moments of their appearance cancel out and justify the years of darkness.
Hermann Hesse
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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.
Hermann Hesse
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I sped through heaven and saw god at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defenses and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart.
Hermann Hesse
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When a writer receives praise or blame, when he arouses sympathy or is ridiculed, when he is loved or rejected, it is not on the strength of his thoughts and dreams as a whole, but only of that infinitesimal part which has been able to make its way through the narrow channel of language and the equally narrow channel of the reader's understanding.
Hermann Hesse
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Good that you ask. You should always ask, always have doubts.
Hermann Hesse
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There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.
Hermann Hesse
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You should never be afraid of people... such fear can destroy us completely. You've simply got to get rid of it, if you want to turn into someone decent. You understand that, don't you?
Hermann Hesse
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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.
Hermann Hesse
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A girl had bidden me eat and drink and sleep, and had shown me friendship and had laughed at me and had called me a silly little boy. And this wonderful friend had talked to me of the saints and shown me that even when I had outdone myself in absurdity I was not alone.
Hermann Hesse
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What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.
Hermann Hesse
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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, that is Atman, that is in me and you and in every creature, and I am beginning to believe that this knowledge has no worse enemy than the man of knowledge, than learning.
Hermann Hesse