β Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve. Hermann Hesse
β I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself. Hermann Hesse
β Love isn’t there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure. Hermann Hesse
β Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish… Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. Hermann Hesse
β Love must not entreat… Or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract. Hermann Hesse
β One never reaches home… But wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time. Hermann Hesse
β Man’s life seems to me like a long, weary night that would be intolerable if there were not occasionally flashes of light, the sudden brightness of which is so comforting and wonderful, that the moments of their appearance cancel out and justify the years of darkness. Hermann Hesse
β 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