In Solitude and Suffering

"True action, good and radiant action, my friends, does not spring from activity, from busy bustling, it does not spring from industrious hammering. It grows in the solitude of the mountains, it grows on the summits where silence and danger dwell. It grows out of the suffering which you have not yet learned to suffer."

Hermann Hesse from Zarathustra’s Return, A Letter to German Youth written to dispirited German youth in 1919 and later included in his 1946 anthology, If the War Goes On.