21 quotes
Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
Steppenwolf (1927)
As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.
Steppenwolf (1927)
Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.
Steppenwolf (1927)
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.
Steppenwolf (1927)
Your faith has found no more air to breathe. And suffocation is a hard death.
Steppenwolf (1927)
"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)
There are a great many suicides to which this thought imparts a common strength.
Steppenwolf (1927)
Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads.
Steppenwolf (1927)
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)
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)
They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what's more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.
Steppenwolf (1927)
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.
Steppenwolf (1927)
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.
Steppenwolf (1927)
"Obeying is like eating and drinking. There's nothing like it if you've been without it too long"
Steppenwolf (1927)
A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self
Steppenwolf (1927)
The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been given back to me today by this friend of mine who taught me dancing.
Steppenwolf (1927)
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.
Steppenwolf (1927)
I sped through heaven and saw god at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defences and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart.
Steppenwolf (1927)
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.
Steppenwolf (1927)