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fc47f32
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I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.
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self-loathing
humble
existentialism
humility
self-realization
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Hermann Hesse |
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e0da567
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I shall no longer be instructed by the Yoga Veda or the Aharva Veda, or the ascetics, or any other doctrine whatsoever. I shall learn from myself, be a pupil of myself; I shall get to know myself, the mystery of Siddhartha." He looked around as if he were seeing the world for the first time."
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Hermann Hesse |
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af1d983
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Opinions mean nothing; they may be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can embrace or reject them.
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Hermann Hesse |
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2616108
|
A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to committ outrages...
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Hermann Hesse |
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519256a
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They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.
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unity
life
siddhartha
hesse
being
water
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Hermann Hesse |
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ed37e28
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You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.
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Hermann Hesse |
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e1aebe0
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One must find the source within one's own Self, one must possess it. Everything else was seeking -- a detour, an error.
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wisdom
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Hermann Hesse |
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39e82d5
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The things we see are the same things that are within us. There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.
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Hermann Hesse |
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a3b4651
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Not in his speech, not in his thoughts, I see his greatness, only in his actions, in his life.
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life
speech
thought
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Hermann Hesse |
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6605c1d
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Dreams and restless thoughts came flowing to him from the river, from the twinkling stars at night, from the sun's melting rays. Dreams and a restlessness of the soul came to him.
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siddhartha
hesse
restlessness
soul
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Hermann Hesse |
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8842a55
|
She stood before him and surrendered herself to him and sky, forest, and brook all came toward him in new and resplendent colors, belonged to him, and spoke to him in his own language. And instead of merely winning a woman he embraced the entire world and every star in heaven glowed within him and sparkled with joy in his soul. He had loved and had found himself. But most people love to lose themselves.
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passion
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Hermann Hesse |
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10314e3
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How absurd these words are, such as beast and beast of prey. One should not speak of animals in that way. They may be terrible sometimes, but they're much more right than men...They're never in any embarrassment. They always know what to do and how to behave themselves. They don't flatter and they don't intrude. They don't pretend. They are as they are, like stones or flowers or stars in the sky.
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Hermann Hesse |
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324d8b3
|
What you call passion is not a spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world. Where passion dominates, that does not signify the presence of greater desire and ambition, but rather the misdirection of these qualities toward and isolated and false goal, with a consequent tension and sultriness in the atmosphere. Those who direct the maximum force of their desires toward the center, toward true being, toward perfection,..
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Hermann Hesse |
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922005a
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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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Hermann Hesse |
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c795ad4
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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.
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Hermann Hesse |
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572d9f5
|
No permanence is ours; we are a wave That flows to fit whatever form it finds
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transience
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Hermann Hesse |
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3e4dc49
|
My goal is this: always to put myself in the place in which I am best able to serve, wherever my gifts and qualities find the best soil to grow, the widest field of action. There is no other goal.
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Hermann Hesse |
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3bcf166
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You should not take old people who are already dead seriously. It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don't mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eter..
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Hermann Hesse |
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b98e460
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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.
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Hermann Hesse |
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fe440b5
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We who bore the mark might well be considered by the rest of the world as strange, even as insane and dangerous. We had awoken, or were awakening, and we were striving for an ever perfect state of wakefulness, whereas the ambition and quest for happiness of the others consisted of linking their opinions, ideals, and duties, their life and happiness, ever more closely with those of the herd. They, too, strove; they, too showed signs of stren..
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humanity
hermann-hesse
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Hermann Hesse |
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d0d05df
|
The reason why I do not know anything about myself, the reason why Siddhartha has remained alien and unknown to myself is due to one thing, to one single thing--I was afraid of myself, I was fleeing from myself. I was seeking Atman, I was seeking Brahman, I was determined to dismember myself and tear away its layers of husk in order to find in its unknown innermost recess the kernel at the heart of those layers, the Atman, life, the divine ..
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Hermann Hesse |
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c61fac6
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How foolish it is to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence.
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Hermann Hesse |
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0d1e0a5
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Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding," Joseph exclaimed. "If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn't there any ..
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philosophy
truth
glass
dogma
game
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Hermann Hesse |
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64b51cf
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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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Hermann Hesse |
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124302e
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No, a true seeker, one who truly wished to find, could accept no doctrine. But the man who has found what he sought, such a man could approve of every doctrine, each and every one, every path, every goal; nothing separated him any longer from all those thousands of others who lived in the eternal, who breathed the Divine.
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seeker
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Hermann Hesse |
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1a99031
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I want to tell you something today, something that I have known for a long while, and you know it too; but perhaps you have never said it to yourself. I am going to tell you now what it is that I know about you and me and our fate. You, Harry, have been an artist and a thinker, a man full of joy and faith, always on the track of what is great and eternal, never content with the trivial and petty. But the more life has awakened you and broug..
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Hermann Hesse |
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c8c8156
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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.
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Hermann Hesse |
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73170d3
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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.
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Hermann Hesse |
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bf714d0
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I call that man awake who, with conscious knowledge and understanding, can perceive the deep unreasoning powers in his soul, his whole innermost strength, desire and weakness, and knows how to reckon with himself.
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wisdom
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Hermann Hesse |
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b4c7b1c
|
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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happiness
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Hermann Hesse |
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379ac68
|
Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain-that it may perhaps be this is not important-but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the small from the same stream, from the same law of cause, of becoming and dying.
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unity
life
siddhartha
uncertainty
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Hermann Hesse |
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333993f
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When you throw a rock into the water, it will speed on the fastest course to the bottom of the water. This is how it is when Siddhartha has a goal, a resolution. Siddhartha does nothing, he waits, he thinks, he fasts, but he passes through the things of the world like a rock through water, without doing anything, without stirring; he is drawn, he lets himself fall. His goal attracts him, because he doesn't let anything enter his soul which ..
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Hermann Hesse |
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fa91315
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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.
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Hermann Hesse |
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6539e85
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Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goals, if he is able to think, if he is able to wait, if he is able to fast.
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magic
people
goals
waiting
thinking
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Hermann Hesse |
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6e5e103
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Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, it beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap... Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with ..
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Hermann Hesse |
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e2339b9
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An enlightened man had but one duty - to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led.
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enlightenment
hermann-hesse
duty
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Hermann Hesse |
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e493bc8
|
Within you, there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at anytime and be yourself.
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Hermann Hesse |
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f74b955
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Each of us has to find out for himself what is permitted and what is forbidden.. forbidden for him. It's possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard. And vice versa.
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Hermann Hesse |
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f269aed
|
For the first time in my life I tasted death, and death tasted bitter, for death is birth, is fear and dread of some terrible renewal.
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death
demian
hermann-hesse
|
Hermann Hesse |
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ed733f4
|
A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life.
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Hermann Hesse |
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dcbd48b
|
Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old brittle husk.
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Hermann Hesse |
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19a6831
|
Alas, Siddhartha, I see you suffering, but you're suffering a pain at which one would like to laugh, at which you'll soon laugh for yourself.
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Hermann Hesse |
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46b5ee0
|
I cannot understand what pleasures and joys they are that drive people to the overcrowded railways and hotels, into the packed cafes with the suffocating and oppressive music, to the Bars and variety entertainments, to World Exhibitions, to the Corsos. I cannot understand nor share these joys, though they are within my reach, for which thousands of others strive. On the other hand, what happens to me in my rare hours of joy, what for me is ..
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Hermann Hesse |
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4d64351
|
and the vessel was not full, his intellect was not satisfied, his soul was not at peace, his heart was not still.
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siddhartha
restlessness
intellect
soul
|
Hermann Hesse |