"I can think. I can wait. I can fast."
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Hermann Hesse quotes (page 15 of 23)
446 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"For the air of lonely men surrounded him now, a still atmosphere in which the world around him slipped away, leaving him incapable of relationship, an atmosphere against which neither will nor longing availed. This was one of the significant earmarks of his life."
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"For me, however, that beloved, glowing little word happiness has become associated with everything I have felt since childhood upon hearing the sound of the word itself."
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"Yes, what we are doing is probably mad, and probably it is good and necessary all the same. It is not a good thing when man overstrains his reason and tries to reduce to rational order matters that are susceptible of rational treatment. Then there arise ideals such as those of the Americans or of the Bolsheviks. Both are extraordinarily rational, and both lead to a frightful oppression and impoverishment of life, because they simplify it so crudely. The likeness of man, once a high ideal, is in process of becoming a machine-made article. It is for madmen like us, perhaps, to ennoble it again."
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"I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me."
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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."
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"Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader."
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"To recognize causes is to think, and through thought alone feelings become knowledge and are not lost, but become real and begin to mature."
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"Every politician in the world is all for revolution, reason, and disarmament-but only in enemy countries, not in his own."
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"During deep meditation it is possible to dispel time, to see simultaneously all the past, present, and future, and then everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman."
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"Sentimentality is a basking in feelings that in reality you don't take seriously enough to make the slightest sacrifice to or ever translate into action."
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"Was it not his Self, his small, fearful and proud Self, with which he had wrestled for so many years, but which had always conquered him again, which appeared each time again and again, which robbed him of happiness and filled him with fear?"
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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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"a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful."
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"The voices of all creatures are in the voices of the river."
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"Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding, and to fulfill their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side."
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"But it's a poor fellow who can't take his pleasure without asking other people's permission."
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"One can beg, buy, be presented with and find love in the streets, but it can never be stolen."
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"I have always been a great dreamer; in dreams I am more active than in my real life, and these shadows sapped me of health and energy."
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"I do want more. I am not content with being happy. I was not made for it. It is not my destiny. My destiny is the opposite."
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