Popular novelist Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) was born in the town of Calw, Germany near the Black Forest, the son of Pietist missionaries. He sold books and was an antiquarian before publishing his first book in 1904.

"That seems to be the way of things. Everyone takes, everyone gives. Life is like that," he once wrote. Because his characters struggled for peace and enlightenment, Hesse became a cult figure amid the war and protests of the turbulent 60s.

"Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud," he said.

A visionary and sensitive genius, Hess wrote with poetic innovation. "My relationship to music has been more intimate and fruitful. It is found in most of my writings," he explained. For several years Hesse underwent psychoanalysis with Carl Jung.

"Each man had only one genuine vocation to find the way to himself," Hesse believed. "His task was to discover his own destiny not an arbitrary one and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself."

Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946 for Steppenwolf, in which character Harry Haller tries to resolve the needs of the flesh with the needs of the spirit.

Observed Hesse: "I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me."

More Hermann HESSE Quotations

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