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"If a night-moth were to concentrate its will on flying to a star or some equally unattainable object, it wouldn't succeed. Only, it wouldn't even try in the first place. A moth confines its search to what has sense and value for it, what it needs, what is indispensable to its life... if I imagined that I wanted under all circumstances to get to the North Pole, then to achieve it I would have to desire it strongly enough that my whole being was ruled by it. But if I were to decide to will that the pastor should stop wearing his glasses, it would be useless. That would be making a game of it."
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"There was a necklace inside. A thin silver chain with a small pendant, a silver pansy."
"All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel."
"The fly ought to be used as the symbol of impertinence and audacity for whilst all other animals shun man more than anything else and run away even before he comes near them the fly lights upon his very nose."
"Such I hold to be the genuine use of Gunpowder: that it makes all men tall."
"It was all extremely symbolic; but then, if you choose to think so, nothing in this world is not symbolical."
Explore more quotes by Hermann Hesse
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure."
"At one time I had given much thought to why men were so very rarely capable of living for an ideal. Now I saw that many, no, all men were capable of dying for one."
"When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. 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 commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols."
"To hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony."
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