112 quotes
You, too, have mysteries of your own.
Demian (1919)
Each of us has to find out for himself what is permitted and what is forbidden — forbidden for him. It's possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard. And vice versa.
Demian (1919)
I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference.
Demian (1919)
Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side. p.83
Journey to the East (1932)
A true seeker could not accept any teachings, not if he sincerely wished to find something. But he who had found, could give his approval to every path, every goal; nothing separated him from all of the other thousands who lived in eternity, who breathed the Divine.
Siddhartha (1922)
There are a great many suicides to which this thought imparts a common strength.
Steppenwolf (1927)
Without a mother, one cannot love. Without a mother, one cannot die.
Narcissus and Goldmund (1930)
Property, possessions and riches had also finally trapped him. They were no longer a game and a toy. They had become a chain and a burden.
Siddhartha (1922)
Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads.
Steppenwolf (1927)
One of the aphorisms occurred to me now and I wrote it under the picture: "Fate and temperament are two words for one and the same concept." That was clear to me now.
Demian (1919)
It is the law of service. He who wishes to live long must serve, but he who wishes to rule does not live long...
Journey to the East (1932)
Like one who has eaten and drunk too much and vomits painfully, and then feels better, so did the restless man wish he could rid himself with one terrific heave of these pleasures, of these habits of this entirely senseless life.
Siddhartha (1922)
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.
Steppenwolf (1927)
In the beginning was the myth. God, in his search for self-expression, invested the souls of Hindus, Greeks, and Germans with poetic shapes and continues to invest each child's soul with poetry every day.
Peter Camenzind (1904)
When two cultures collide is the only time when true suffering exists
Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Time (1977)
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.
Steppenwolf (1927)
The tree does not die. It waits.
Demian (1919)
If what matters in a person's existence is to accept the inevitable consciously, to taste the good and bad to the full and to make for oneself a more individual, unaccidental and inward destiny alongside one's external fate, then my life has been neither empty nor worthless.
Gertrude (1910)
Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.
Peter Camenzind (1904)
I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?
Demian (1919)