Peter Camenzind

“I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.””

— Hermann Hesse

“The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes almost arrogant. You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine's Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world's puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies.””

— Hermann Hesse

“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

“الألم وألوان الخيبة والكآبة لا توجد لتحزننا ولتجردنا من القيمة والكرامة، وإنما وجدت لتزيدنا نضجاً وصفاءً””

— Hermann Hesse

“I began to sense that I would be a stranger in society for the rest of my life, and the desire was born in me to lead my life outside this society.””

— Hermann Hesse

“I would lie for hours by the window gazing down upon the black lake and up at the mountains silhouetted against the wan sky, with stars suspended above. Then a fearfully sweet, overpowering emotion would take hold of me”

— Hermann Hesse

“I wanted … people to listen to the pulse of nature, to partake of the wholeness of life and not forget, under the pressure of their petty destinies, that we are not gods and have not created ourselves but are the children of the earth, part of the cosmos.””

— Hermann Hesse

“It enraged and exhausted me to observe how the common daily life callously demanded its due and devoured the abundance of optimism I had brought with me.””

— Hermann Hesse