“Only the ideas that we actually live are of any value.”
Source: Demian (1919), p. 146
Context: Only the ideas that we actually live are of any value. You knew all along that your sanctioned world was only half the world and you tried to suppress the second half the same way the priests and teachers do. You won't succeed. No one succeeds in this once he has begun to think.
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Hermann Hesse 168
German writer 1877–1962Related quotes
“Ideas get substance and value not by being discussed but by being lived.”
"Biography and Criticism", p. 160
The Progress of a Biographer (1949)
“I’m living in separate universes, and I have no idea where I actually belong.”
Source: This is Where I Leave You

“Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living.”
Nelly Dean (Ch. XIII).
Wuthering Heights (1847)

Source: The Secret Oral Teachings in the Tibetan Buddhist Sects (1964)

as quoted by Michael Grossman in the The First Nonlinear System of Differential and Integral Calculus (1979).
The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1959)

“The loss of…honest and industrious men's lives cannot be valued at any price.”
Ch. 3.

Kulturphilosophie (1923), Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics
Context: Reverence for life, veneratio vitæ, is the most direct and at the same time the profoundest achievement of my will-to-live.
In reverence for life my knowledge passes into experience. The simple world- and life-affirmation which is within me just because I am will-to-live has, therefore, no need to enter into controversy with itself, if my will-to-live learns to think and yet does not understand the meaning of the world. In spite of the negative results of knowledge, I have to hold fast to world- and life-affirmation and deepen it. My life carries its own meaning in itself. This meaning lies in my living out the highest idea which shows itself in my will-to-live, the idea of reverence for life. With that for a starting-point I give value to my own life and to all the will-to-live which surrounds me, I persevere in activity, and I produce values.