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... let us recall the well-known statement of a university professor in the Republic of the Massagetes: 'Not the faculty but His Excellency the General can properly determine the sum of two and two.'

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
University
Recalls
Mathematics
Professors
General
Statement
Known
Properly
Two
Faculty
Wells
Republic
Excellency
Well
Statements
Professor
Determine
Recall

More quotes by 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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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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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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What we can and should change is ourselves: our impatience, our egoism (including intellectual egoism), our sense of injury, our lack of love and forbearance. I regard every other attempt to change the world, even if it springs from the best intentions, as futile.
Hermann Hesse
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Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists of putting too high a value on time. In eternity there is no time. Eternity is a moment, just long enough for a joke
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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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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...and gradually his face assumed the expressions which are so often found among rich people - the expressions of discontent, of sickliness, of displeasure, of idleness, of lovelessness. Slowly the soul sickness of the rich crept over 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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Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.
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?
Hermann Hesse
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You can ride, you can travel with a friend of your own The final step you must take alone. No wisdom is better than this when known: That every hard thing is done alone.
Hermann Hesse
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Some of us think holding on makes us strong but sometimes it is letting go.
Hermann Hesse
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lucid and quiet his voice hovered above the listeners, like a light, like a starry sky.
Hermann Hesse
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Everything that was not suffered to the end and finally concluded, recurred, and the same sorrows were undergone.
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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He saw that the water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there it was always the same and yet every moment it was new.
Hermann Hesse
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At one time I had given much thought to why men were so very rarely capable of living for an ideal. Now I saw that many, no, all men were capable of dying for one.
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?
Hermann Hesse
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His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands and thousands.
Hermann Hesse