112 quotes
If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.
Demian (1919)
I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back.
Demian (1919)
When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do.
Narcissus and Goldmund (1930)
"Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One's born at once one is guilty."
Steppenwolf (1927)
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.
Steppenwolf (1927)
You must find your dream, then the way becomes easy. But there is no dream that lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular one.
Demian (1919)
I had grown a thin mustache, I was a full-grown man, and yet I was completely helpless and without a goal in life.
Demian (1919)
The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life's wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.
Abraxas was the god who was both god and devil.
Demian (1919)
If I know what love is, it is because of you.
Narcissus and Goldmund (1930)
Others sense their own laws within them; things are forbidden to them that every honorable man will do any day in the year and other things are allowed to them that are generally despised?
Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.
Siddhartha (1922)
Even the hour of our death may send
Us speeding on to fresh and newer spaces,
And life may summon us to newer races.
So be it, heart: bid farewell without end.
The Glass Bead Game (1943)
Whether you and I and a few others will renew the world someday remains to be seen. But within ourselves we must renew it each day, otherwise we just aren't serious. Don't forget that!
Demian (1919)
Certainly you shouldn't go kill somebody or rape a girl, no! But you haven't reached the point where you can understand the actual meaning of "permitted" and "forbidden." You've only sensed part of the truth.
Demian (1919)
Each man had only one genuine vocation — to find the way to himself
Demian (1919)
When you throw a rock into the water, it will speed on the fastest course to the bottom of the water. This is how it is when Siddhartha has a goal, a resolution.
Siddhartha (1922)
Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goals, if he is able to think, if he is able to wait, if he is able to fast.
Siddhartha (1922)
At about the age of six or seven, I realized that of all the invisible powers the one I was destined to be most strongly affected and dominated by was music.
Gertrude (1910)
Each person must stand on his own feet.
Demian (1919)