Hermann Hesse on Discovering the Soul Beneath the Self and the Key to Finding Peace

“Self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.”

“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight,” E.E. Cummings told students from the hard-earned platform of his middle age, not long after Virginia Woolf contemplated the courage to be yourself.

It is true, of course, that the self is a place of illu...