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If my life were not a dangerous, painful experiment, if I did not constantly skirt the abyss and feel the void under my feet, my life would have no meaning and I would not have been able to write anything.

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
Feels
Constantly
Writing
Meaning
Skirt
Would
Feet
Skirts
Life
Dangerous
Abyss
Write
Experiment
Anything
Void
Able
Experiments
Feel
Painful

More quotes by 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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Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One's born and at once one is guilty.
Hermann Hesse
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Faith is stronger than so-called reality.
Hermann Hesse
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Happiness is love, nothing else. A man who is capable of love is happy.
Hermann Hesse
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Whither will my path yet lead me? This path is stupid, it goes in spirals, perhaps in circles, but whichever way it goes, I will follow it.
Hermann Hesse
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Everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my loving understanding then all is well with me and nothing can harm me.
Hermann Hesse
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Faith and doubt go hand in hand, they are complementaries. One who never doubts will never truly believe.
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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And here is a doctrine at which you will laugh. It seems to me, Govinda, that love is the most important thing in the world.
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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We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral we have already climbed many steps.
Hermann Hesse
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We create gods and struggle with them, and they bless us.
Hermann Hesse
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It was all a lie, it all stank, stank of lies, it all gave the illusion of meaning and happiness and beauty, and all of it was just putrefaction that no one would admit to. Bitter was the taste of the world. Life was a torment.
Hermann Hesse
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The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted yes almost arrogant. You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine's Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world's puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies.
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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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.
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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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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Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.
Hermann Hesse
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Should we be mindful of dreams? Joseph asked. Can we interpret them? The Master looked into his eyes and said tersely: We should be mindful of everything, for we can interpret everything.
Hermann Hesse