An enlightened man had but one duty - to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led. - Hermann Hesse

Be still, my heart, away with pain! Though passion stirs again In blood that now flows slowly And leads to paths once known, These paths you tread in vain For youth has flown.

And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life.

...Haller's sickness of the soul, as I now know, is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs, a sickness, it seems, that by no means attacks the weak and worthless only but, rather, precisely those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts.