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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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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
Trying
Siddhartha
Always
Tries
Men
Foolish
Sounds
Communicate
Wise
Wisdom
Sound
Communicable

More quotes by Hermann Hesse

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What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you're searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don't find the time for finding?
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Nevertheless, whether in occurrences lasting days, hours or mere minutes at a time, I have experienced happiness often, and have had brief encounters with it in my later years, even in old age.
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. . . gentleness is stronger than severity, water is stronger than rock, love is stronger than force.
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To achieve the possible, we must attempt the impossible again and again.
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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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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.
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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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But your questions, which are unanswerable without exception, all spring from the same erroneous thinking.
Hermann Hesse
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You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality. That is the prison where you lie.
Hermann Hesse
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Things are going downhill with you!' he said to himself, and laughed about it, and as he was saying it, he happened to glance at the river, and he also saw the river going downhill, always moving on downhill, and singing and being happy through it all.
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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Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain-that it may perhaps be this is not important-but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the small from the same stream, from the same law of cause, of becoming and dying.
Hermann Hesse
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The world, as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish — and it will.
Hermann Hesse
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Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.
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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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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The mind is international and supra-national ... it ought to serve not war and annihilation, but peace and reconciliation.
Hermann Hesse
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our friendship has no other purpose, no other reason, than to show you how utterly unlike me you are.
Hermann Hesse
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I have always been a great dreamer in dreams I am more active than in my real life, and these shadows sapped me of health and energy.
Hermann Hesse
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One of the disadwantages of school and learning, he thought dreamily, was that the mind seemed to have the tendency too see and represent all things as though they were flat and had only two dimensions. This, somehow, seemed to render all matters of intellect shallow and worthless.
Hermann Hesse