“That's the way it is when you love. It makes you suffer, and I have suffered much in the years since. But it matters little that you suffer, so long as you feel alive with a sense of the close bond that connects all living things, so long as love does not die!”
— Hermann Hesse
“If what matters in a person's existence is to accept the inevitable consciously, to taste the good and bad to the full and to make for oneself a more individual, unaccidental and inward destiny alongside one's external fate, then my life has been neither empty nor worthless.”
— Hermann Hesse
“At about the age of six or seven, I realized that of all the invisible powers the one I was destined to be most strongly affected and dominated by was music.”
— Hermann Hesse
“Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.”
— Hermann Hesse
“In the beginning was the myth. God, in his search for self-expression, invested the souls of Hindus, Greeks, and Germans with poetic shapes and continues to invest each child's soul with poetry every day.”
— Hermann Hesse
“I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?”
— Hermann Hesse