The best quotes by Hermann Hesse

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He who has courage and character is always very disquieting for those who stand next to him.

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All the things, also the less interesting ones, or the most ugly, have an pleasant side. You must just want to see it.

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Love doesn't want to have, wants to only love.

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Goodness and reason are not in nature, but exist in us, in us human beings with whom the fate has fun; but we can be stronger and the nature of fate, even if only for a few moments. We can also be close to each other, when we need it, and we look into the eyes with comprehension; we can love each other and live comparing each other.

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This compassionate Idiot denies the whole of Life, all thinking and feeling, all that the world and reality mean to others. For him Reality is something entirely different than for them. Their Reality is for him a shadow: For that reason, because he sees and offers a new Reality, he becomes the enemy. [...] He has literally, once and more than once, stood on the magic borderland where everything is affirmed, where not only the remotest thought is true, but also the contrary of such thought. His innocence is not so harmless and men are rightly in awe of him.[...] He does not break the Tables of the Law, he simply turns them round and shows that the contrary to them is written on the other side.

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Already since then the feelings were those that should've remained for ever: the uncertainty of his own worth, a constant oscillating between self-esteem and dejection, between an idealism which lied above al worldly matter and a natural appetite of the senses, and now as then, even a hundred times later did I see those traits in my nature sometimes as a despicable illness, and sometimes as a sign of worth.

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On no morning of his life had he ever been in good spirits nor done any good before midday, nor ever had a happy idea, nor devised any pleasure for himself or others. By degrees during the afternoon he warmed and became alive, and only towards evening, on his good days, was he productive, active and, sometimes, aglow with joy. With this was bound up his need for loneliness and independence. There was never a man with a deeper and more passionate craving for independence than he. In his youth when he was poor and had difficulty in earning his bread, he preferred to go hungry and in torn clothes rather than endanger his narrow limit of independence. He never sold himself for money or an easy life or to women or to those in power; and had thrown away a hundred times what in the world's eyes was his advantage and happiness in order to safeguard his liberty. [...] In the beginning his dream and his happiness, in the end it was his bitter fate. The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure. He achieved his aim. He was ever more independent. He took orders from no man and ordered his ways to suit no man. Independently and alone, he decided what to do and to leave undone. For every strong man attains to that which a genuine impulse bids him seek. But in the midst of the freedom he had attained Harry suddenly became aware that his freedom was a death and that he stood alone.

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And everything together, all the voices,
all the destinations, all the wishes,
all the pains, all the joy, all the good and evil,
all that together made up your world.
All that was the river of what was to come,
it was life's music.

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But every man is more than just himself he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again.

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Happy is he who can love much. But loving and wanting aren't the same things.