What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world.
HERMANN HESSESeriousness 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.
More Hermann Hesse Quotes
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Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.
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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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You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.
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I live in my dreams — that’s what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That’s the difference.
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Gentleness is stronger than severity, water is stronger than rock, love is stronger than force.
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Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.
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Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long.
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Loneliness is the way by which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself.
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Solitude is independence.
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In every truth, the opposite is equally true. For example, a truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is onesided.
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Chaos demands to be recognized and experienced before letting itself be converted into a new order.
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You can ride, you can travel with a friend of your own; The final step you must take alone. No wisdom is better than this when known: That every hard thing is done alone.
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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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A magic dwells in each beginning, protecting us, telling us how to live.
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Within you there is a stillness and sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself.
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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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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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A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening.
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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.
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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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My real self wanders elsewhere, far away, wanders on and on invisibly and has nothing to do with my life.
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The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.
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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.
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Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism.
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Passion is always a mystery and unaccountable, and unfortunately there is no doubt that life does not spare its purest children; often it is just the most deserving people who cannot help loving those that destroy them.
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Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.
HERMANN HESSE