“These persons all have two souls, two beings within them. There is God and the devil in them; the mother's blood and the father's; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the wolf and man in Harry.”Hermann Hesse book SteppenwolfSteppenwolf (1927)
“It was as if by becoming a musician and Music Master he had chosen music as one of the ways toward man's highest goal, inner freedom, purity, perfection, and as though ever since making that choice he has done nothing but let himself be more and more permeated, transformed, purified by music — his entire self from his nimble, clever pianist's hands and his vast, well-stocked musician's memory to all the parts and organs of body and soul, to his pulses and breathing, to his sleep and dreaming — so that he was now only a symbol, or rather a manifestation, a personification of music.”Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead GameThe Glass Bead Game (1943)
“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 book DemianSource: Demian (1919), p. 134