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What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world.

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
Force
Soul
World
Friction
Outside
Passion
Call
Spiritual

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Om is the bow, the arrow is soul.
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Faith is stronger than so-called reality.
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There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.
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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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We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots and executions. We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, suffering and shame.In the same way all disrespect for life, all hard-heartedness,all indifference, all contempt is nothing else than killing.
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Each of us is merely one human being, merely an experiment, a way station. But each of us should be on the way toward perfection, should be striving to reach the center, not the periphery.
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What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life
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You wouldn't consider all the bipeds you pass on the street human beings simply because they walk upright and carry their young in their bellies nine months! It is obvious how many of them are fish or sheep, worms or angels, how many are ants, how many are bees!
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Youth ends when egotism does maturity begins when one lives for others.
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Like one who has eaten and drunk too much and vomits painfully and then feels better, so did the restless man wish he could rid himself with one terrific heave of these pleasures, of these habits of this entirely senseless life.
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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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It was the first rent in the holy image of my father, it was the first fissure in the columns that had upheld my childhood, which every individual must destroy before he can become himself.
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Happiness is love, nothing else. A man who is capable of love is happy.
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People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.
Hermann Hesse
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I, also, would like to look and smile, sit and walk like that, so free, so worthy, so restrained, so candid, so childlike and mysterious. A man only looks and walks like that when he has conquered his Self. I also will conquer my Self.
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
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All higher humor begins with ceasing to take oneself seriously.
Hermann Hesse
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I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me.
Hermann Hesse
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When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
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Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can - that is their secret.
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