Steppenwolf

by Hermann Hesse

• Self-hate is really the samething as sheer egoism and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.

• Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.

• How foolis to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth!Solitude is independence. It was cold. But it was also still wonderfully still and vast like the cold vastness of space in which the stars revolve.

• Even the unhappiest life has its sunny moments and its little flowers of happiness between sand and stone.

• The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money, of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.

• A man cannot live intenselyaccept at the cost of the self.

• Man is not capable of thought in any high degree and even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men habitually sees the world and himself through the lenses of delusional formulas and artless simplifications - and the most of all himself.

• You have always done the difficult and complicated things and the simple ones you haven’t even learned.

• 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.

• Time and the world, money and power belong to the small people and the shallow people. To the rest, to the real men belongs nothing. Nothing but death. And eternity.

• Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we’re responsible all the same. One’s born and at once one is guilty.

• Better learn to listen first! Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.

• In eternity there is no posterity. Eternity was nothing else than the redemption of time, its return to innocence, so to speak, and its transformation again into space.