Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) was a Germany-born Swiss author, poet, and painter. He is best known for his novels that explore themes of spirituality and the search for authenticity, and he received a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946.
CLEAR ALL
Life’s work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into the circle wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will.
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Affliction is often that thing which prepares an ordinary person for some sort of an extraordinary destiny.
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Stay a verb—don’t become a noun.
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I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.
. . . it is almost always the case that whatever has wounded you will also be instrumental in your healing.
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If you bring forth what is within you it will save you. If you do not, it will destroy you.
Respect the fact that all you do and are now has evolved for a good reason and serves an important purpose.
The inner revolution will not be televised or sold on the Internet. It must take place within one’s own mind and heart.
We cannot make another person change his or her steps to an old dance, but if we change our own steps, the dance no longer can continue in the same predictable pattern.
Only through our connectedness to others can we really know and enhance the self. And only through working on the self can we begin to enhance our connectedness to others.
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