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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
Lived
Taught
Literature
Truth

More quotes by 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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The true profession of a man is to find his way to himself.
Hermann Hesse
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A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to committ outrages.
Hermann Hesse
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It is not our purpose to become each other it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and complement.
Hermann Hesse
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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.
Hermann Hesse
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Oh, if I had had a friend at this moment, a friend in an attic room, dreaming by candlelight and with a violin lying ready at his hand! How I should have slipped up to him in his quiet hour, noiselessly climbing the winding stair to take him by surprise, and then with talk and music we should have held heavenly festival throughout the night!
Hermann Hesse
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You are only afriad if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them!
Hermann Hesse
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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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People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest. It was a scandal that a breed of fearless and sinister people ran around freely, so they attached a nickname and a myth to these people to get even with them, to make up for the many times they had felt afraid.
Hermann Hesse
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Everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my loving understanding then all is well with me and nothing can harm me.
Hermann Hesse
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Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long.
Hermann Hesse
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Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader.
Hermann Hesse
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Truly, nothing in the world has so occupied my thoughts as this I, this riddle, the fact I am alive, that I am separated and isolated from all others, that I am Siddhartha! And about nothing in the world do I know less about than me, about Siddhartha!
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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Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.
Hermann Hesse
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The tree does not die, it waits.
Hermann Hesse
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Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.
Hermann Hesse
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Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.
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.
Hermann Hesse
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I believe that the struggle against death, the unconditional and self-willed determination to live, is the mode of power behind the lives and activities of all outstanding men.
Hermann Hesse