“I am superior to you only in one point: I'm awake, whereas you are only half awake, or completely asleep sometimes. I call a man awake who knows in his conscious reason his innermost unreasonable force, drives, and weaknesses and knows how to deal with them.”

German-Swiss poet and novelist

Hermann Hesse was a German-Swiss poet and novelist. He won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature and is best known for novels such as Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Narcissus and Goldmund, and The Glass Bead Game. His writing was shaped by his interest in Eastern religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions, as well as by his engagement with Jungian analysis. Across his fiction, he returns to the search for authenticity, self-knowledge, and spiritual meaning.