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Age
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Now everything changed. My childhood world was breaking apart around me. My parents eyed me with a certain embarrassment. My sisters had become strangers to me. A disenchantment falsified and blunted my usual feelings and joys: the garden lacked fragrance, the woods held no attraction for me, the world stood around me like a clearance sale of last year's secondhand goods, insipid, all its charm gone. Books were so much paper, music a grating noise. That is the way leaves fall around a tree in autumn, a tree unaware of the rain running down its sides, of the sun or the frost, and of life gradually retreating inward. The tree does not die. It waits.
-Hermann Hesse, Demian, 1918
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Art
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So wie die Verruecktheit in einem hoeheren Sinn, der Anfang aller Weisheit ist, so ist die Schizophrenie der Anfang aller Kunst, aller Phantasie. (As insanity in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizophrenia the beginning of all art, all fantasy.)
-Hermann Hesse
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Books
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Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
-Hermann Hesse
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Bravery
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People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.
-Hermann Hesse
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Class
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What I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.
-Hermann Hesse
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Conversation
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Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.
-Hermann Hesse
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Death
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The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.
-Hermann Hesse
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Discovery
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-Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
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Fear
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You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves.
-Hermann Hesse
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Growth
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I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.
-Hermann Hesse
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Happiness
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Happiness is a how, not a what: a talent, not an object
-Hermann Hesse
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Hate
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If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.
-Hermann Hesse
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History
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You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.
-Hermann Hesse
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Home
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One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.
-Hermann Hesse
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Humanity
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The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.
-Hermann Hesse
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What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men -- each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature -- are shot down wholesale.
-Hermann Hesse
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Individuality
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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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Knowledge
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There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge -- that is everywhere.
-Hermann Hesse
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Life
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I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?
-Hermann Hesse, Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth, 1919
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Love
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Love is stronger than violence.
-Hermann Hesse
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Music
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I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.
-Hermann Hesse
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Nature
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For example, there is a species of butterfly, a night-moth, in which the females are much less common than the males. The moths breed exactly like all animals, the male fertilizes the female and the female lays the eggs. Now, if you take a female night moth----many naturalists have tried this experiment---the male moths will visit this female at night and they will come from hours away. From hours away! Just think! From a distance of several miles all these males sense the only female in the region. One looks for an explanation for this phenomenon but it is not easy. You must assume that they have a sense of smell of some sort like a hunting dog that can pick up and follow a semmingly imperceptible scent. Do you see? Nature abounds with such inexplicable things. But my argument is: if the female moths were as abundant as the males, the latter would not have such a highly developed sense of smell. They've acquired it only because they had to train themseleves to to have it. If a person were to concentrate all his will power on a certain end, then he would achieve it. That's all. And that also answers your question. Examine a person closely enough and you know more about him than he does himself.
-Hermann Hesse, Demian, 1919
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Reality
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Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.
-Hermann Hesse
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Relationships
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He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships become newly born. Each one was mortal, a passionate, painful example of all that is transitory. Yet none of them died, they only changed, were always reborn, continually had a new face: only time stood between one face and another.
-Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
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Serenity
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Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself.
-Hermann Hesse
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Books by and about Hermann Hesse