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A mere nothing suffices — and the lightning strikes.

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
Lightning
Strikes
Mere
Nothing
Suffices

More quotes by Hermann Hesse

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The river is everywhere.
Hermann Hesse
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Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long.
Hermann Hesse
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If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.
Hermann Hesse
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I suddenly saw how sad and artificial my life had been during this period, for the loves, friends, habits and pleasures of these years were discarded like badly fitting clothes. I parted from them without pain and all that remained was to wonder that I could have endured them so long.
Hermann Hesse
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Once you are able to make your request in such a way that you will be quite certain of its fulfillment, then the fulfillment will come.
Hermann Hesse
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I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back.
Hermann Hesse
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In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified.
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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People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.
Hermann Hesse
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The bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self.... And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation andsecurity. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire.
Hermann Hesse
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Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.
Hermann Hesse
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Love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is only your aversion to it that hurts, nothing else.
Hermann Hesse
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When we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.
Hermann Hesse
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I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself that beast astray that finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.
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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A house without books is a poor house, even if beautiful rugs are covering its floors and precious wallpapers and pictures cover its walls
Hermann Hesse
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Youth ends when egotism does maturity begins when one lives for others.
Hermann Hesse
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A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
Hermann Hesse
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Only the ideas that we really live have any value.
Hermann Hesse
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The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people — eternal life.
Hermann Hesse