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"Both the thoughts and the senses were pretty things, the ultimate meaning was hidden behind both of them... from both the secret voices of the innermost truth had to be attentively perceived."
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"When we feel lost in time, with only shadows of the past living in our mind; when the moment, which "was", no longer "is and when only silence remains, loads of questions arise. We can cry a river or we may wonder: "What went wrong?"

"What could a child know of the darkness of God's plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream."

"The skeletons of the past must not hold back the dream of a new life, even though fear and regret, guilt and remorse may unsettle us during the effort to give our future a new home. ['Into a new life']"

"I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual."

"If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?"

"We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence."

"She seemed to be occupied with of inner chamber of ideas and to have slight need for visible objects."

"Maybe we feel empty because we spend so much of our own time watching other people live their lives, chase their dreams, express their love, and navigate their relationships. And when we turn off our TV or put down our phone... We've nourished nothing of our own."

"There is always a zone where somebody is nobody, there is always a zone where somebody is somebody and there is always a zone where nobody is nobody."
Explore more quotes by Hermann Hesse

"To deal with history [life] means to abandon one's self to chaos but to retain a belief in the ordination and the meaning. It is a very serious task."

"It was fortunate that love did not need words, or else it would be full of misunderstanding and foolishness."

"... it would be better for our country and the world in general, if at least the few people who were capable of thought stood for reason and the love of peace instead of heading wildly with blind obsession for new war."

"What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale."

"That is just what life is when it is beautiful and happy - a game! Naturally, one can also do all kinds of other things with it, make a duty of it, or a battleground, or a prison, but that does not make it any prettier."

"His way had therefore come full circle, or rather had taken the form of an ellipse or a spiral, following as ever no straight unbroken line, for the rectilinear belongs only to Geometry and not to Nature and Life."

"Either a man goes and hangs himself, and then he hangs sure enough, and he'll have his reasons for it, or else he goes on living and then he has only living to bother himself with. Simple enough."

"There had been a quarrel, she had been hurt, had wept. Now it was over; now she sat still and waited. Life would go on. As with children. As with animals. If only you did not talk, did not make simple things complicated, did not turn your soul inside out."

"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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