Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf (1927)

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A girl had bidden me eat and drink and sleep, and had shown me friendship and had laughed at me and had called me a silly little boy. And this wonderful friend had talked to me of the saints and shown me that even when I had outdone myself in absurdity I was not alone.

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
Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads.

Hermann Hesse
It is not a good thing when man overstrains his reason and tries to reduce to rational order matters that are no susceptible of rational treatment. Then there are ideals such as those of the Americans or Bolsheviks. Both are extraordinarily rational, and both lead to a frightful oppression and impoverishment of life, because they simplify it so crudely. The likeness of man, once a high ideal, is in process of becoming a machinemade article. It is for madmen like us, perhaps, to ennoble it again.

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
What I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.

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

Hermann Hesse
Oh, if I had had a friend at this moment, a friend in an attic room, dreaming by candlelight and with a violin lying ready at his hand! How I should have slipped up to him in his quiet hour, noiselessly climbing the winding stair to take him by surprise, and then with talk and music we should have held heavenly festival throughout the night!

Hermann Hesse
Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.

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
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
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
In the German spirit the matriarchal link with nature rules in the form of the hegemony of music to an extent unknown in any other people.

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

Hermann Hesse
There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.

Hermann Hesse
One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too.

Hermann Hesse
Without really wanting to at all, they pay calls and carry on conversations, sit out their hours at desks and on office chairs; and it is all compulsory, mechanical and against the grain, and it could all be done or left undone just as well by machines; and indeed the never ending machinery that prevents their being, like me, the critics of their own lives and recognizing the stupidity and shallowness, the hopeless tragedy and waste of the lives they lead, and the awful ambiguity grinning over it all. And they are right, right a thousand times to live as they do, playing their games and pursuing their business, instead of resisting the dreary machine and staring into the void as I do, who have left the track.

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
No, I'm not religious I'm sorry to say. There is no time now to be religious."
"No time. Does it need time to be religious?"
"Oh, yes. To be religious you must have time and, even more, independence of time. You can't be religious in earnest and at the same time live in actual things and still take them seriously, time and money and Odéon Bar and all that."

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
A thousand such possibilities await him. His fate brings them on, leaving him no choice; for those outside of the bourgeoisie live in the atmosphere of these magic possibilities. A mere nothing suffices — and the lightning strikes.

Hermann Hesse