Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf (1927)

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I cannot understand nor share these joys, though they are within my reach, for which thousands of others strive. On the other hand, what happens to me in my rare hours of joy, what for me is bliss and life and ecstasy and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in life it finds it absurd. And in fact, if the world is right, if this music of the cafés, these mass enjoyments and these Americanised men who are pleased with so little are right, then I am wrong, I am crazy. I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray who finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.

Hermann Hesse
Now what we call bourgeois, when regarded as an element always to be found in human life, is nothing else than the search for a balance. It is the striving after a mean between the countless extremes and opposite that arise in human conduct.

Hermann Hesse
Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One's born at once one is guilty.

Hermann Hesse
And what is called history at school, and all we learn by heart there about heroes and geniuses and great deeds and fine emotions, is all nothing but a swindle invented by the schoolmasters for educational reasons to keep children occupied for a given number of years. It has always been so and always will be.

Hermann Hesse
The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.

Hermann Hesse
All this, I said, just as today was the case with the beginnings of wireless, would be of no more service to man than as an escape from himself and his true aims, and a means of surrounding himself with an ever closer mesh of distractions and useless activities.

Hermann Hesse
The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer's voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death.

Hermann Hesse
In fear I hurried this way and that. I had the taste of blood and chocolate in my mouth, the one as hateful as the other.

Hermann Hesse
You learned people and artists have, no doubt, all sorts of superior things in your heads; but you're human beings like the rest of us, and we, too, have our dreams and fancies.

Hermann Hesse
We have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.

Hermann Hesse
Every ego so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though is was a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares this delusion.

Hermann Hesse
You should not take old people who are already dead seriously. It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don't mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

Hermann Hesse
I do want more. I am not content with being happy. I was not made for it. It is not my destiny. My destiny is the opposite.

Hermann Hesse
A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self

Hermann Hesse
The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life.

Hermann Hesse
Out whole civilization was a cemetery where Jesus Christ and Socrates, Mozart and Haydn, Dante and Goethe were but indecipherable names on moldering stones; and the mourners who stood round affecting a pretense of sorrow would give much to believe in these inscriptions which once were holy, or at least to utter one heart-felt word of grief and despair about this world that is no more. And nothing was left them but the embarrassed grimaces of a company round a grave.

Hermann Hesse
The bourgeois today burns as heretics and hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments tomorrow.

Hermann Hesse
All birth means separation from the All, the confinement within limitation, the separation from God, the pangs of being born ever anew. The return into the All, the dissolution of painful individuation, the reunion with God means the expansion of the soul until it is able once more to embrace the All.

Hermann Hesse
For the first time I understood Goethe's laughter, the laughter of the immortals. It was a laughter without an object. It was simply light and lucidity. It was that which is left over when a true man has passed through all the sufferings, vices, mistakes, passions, and misunderstandings of men and got through to eternity and the world of space. And eternity was nothing else than the redemption of time, its return to innocence, so to speak, and its transformation again to space.

Hermann Hesse
He gained strength through familiarity with the thought that the emergency exit stood always open and became curious, too, to taste his suffering to the dregs. If it went too badly with him he could feel sometimes with a grim malicious pleasure: I am curious to see all the same just how much man can endure. If the limit of what is bearable is reached, I have only to open the door to escape. There are a great many suicides to which this thought imparts a common strength.

Hermann Hesse
But it's a poor fellow who can't take his pleasure without asking other people's permission.

Hermann Hesse
Your faith has found no more air to breathe. And suffocation is a hard death.

Hermann Hesse
As for others and the world around him he never ceased in his heroic and earnest endeavor to love them, to be just to them, to do them no harm, for the love of his neighbor was as deeply in him as the hatred of himself, and so his whole life was an example that love of one's neighbor is not possible without love of one's self, and that self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.

Hermann Hesse
Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old brittle husk.

Hermann Hesse
Instead of playing his part as truly and honestly as he could, the German intellectual has constantly rebelled against the word and against reason and courted wonderful creations of sound, and wonderful beauties of feeling and mood that were never pressed home to reality, has left the greater part of its practical gifts to decay. None of us intellectuals is at home in reality. We are strange to it and hostile. That is why the part played by intellect even in our own German reality, in our history and politics and public opinion, has be so lamentable a one.

Hermann Hesse