Quotes from book
Peter Camenzind

Name: Peter Camenzind
Author: Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse Original title Peter Camenzind (German, 1904)

Peter Camenzind, published in 1904, was the first novel by Hermann Hesse. It contains a number of themes that were to preoccupy the author in many of his later works, most notably the individual's search for a unique spiritual and physical identity amidst the backdrops of nature and modern civilization, and the role of art in the formation of personal identity. The style of Peter Camenzind is easy to follow, even as it is a Bildungsroman in an atypical sense.

“Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.”

Hermann Hesse book Peter Camenzind

Peter Camenzind (1904)

“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 book Peter Camenzind

Peter Camenzind (1904)

“Sadness when there should be Joy, hatred when there should be love show compassion because we can be more because we both have scars and pain that no one will ever understand but us so be with me not against me and bring us where we were happy and free.”

Hermann Hesse book Peter Camenzind

Peter Camenzind (1904)

“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 book Peter Camenzind

Variant translation: In the beginning was the myth. Just as the great god composed and struggled for expression in the souls of the Indians, the Greeks and Germanic peoples, so to it continues to compose daily in the soul of every child.
Peter Camenzind (1904)