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Gratitude is not a virtue I believe in, and to me it seems hypocritical to expect it from a child.

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
Children
Believe
Hypocritical
Gratitude
Expect
Virtue
Child
Seems

More quotes by Hermann Hesse

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And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life.
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It taught him how to listen -- how to listen with a quiet heart and a waiting soul, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgment, without opinion.
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I shall begin my story with an experience I had when I was ten and attended our small town's Latin school.
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Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.
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The best weapons against the infamies of life are courage, wilfulness and patience. Courage strenthens, wilfulness is fun and patience provides tranquility.
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!
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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.
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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.
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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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We create gods and struggle with them, and they bless us.
Hermann Hesse
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That is why we were drawn to one another and why we are brother and sister. I am going to teach you to dance and play and smile, and still not be happy. And you are going to teach me to think and to know and yet not be happy. Do you know that we are both children of the Devil?
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Siddhartha stopped fighting his fate this very hour, and he stopped suffering.
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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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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.
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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It is good to taste for yourself everything you need to know. That worldly pleasures and wealth are not good things, I learned even as a child. I knew it for a long time, but only now have I experienced it.
Hermann Hesse
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You're quite right there, he said. I have practiced abstinence myself for years, and had my time of fasting, too, but now I find myself once more beneath the sign of Aquarius, a dark and humid constellation.
Hermann Hesse
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In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war have not yet been republished there.
Hermann Hesse
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He had loved and he had found himself. Most people love to lose themselves.
Hermann Hesse
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I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am responsible for what I do with the life I've got.
Hermann Hesse