Steppenwolf Quotes

“Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.”
― Herman Hesse

“Most men will not swim before they are able to.” Is that not witty? Naturally, they won't swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they wont think. 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.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“There is, in fact, no way back either to the wolf or to the child. From the very start there is no innocence and no singleness. Every created thing, even the simplest, is already guilty, already multiple. It has been thrown into the muddy stream of being and may never more swim back again to its source. The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life. Nor will suicide really solve your problem [...] You will, instead, embark on the longer and wearier and harder road of life. You will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace. This is the road that Buddha and every great man has gone, whether consciously or not, insofar as fortune has favored his quest.”
― Herman Hesse

“madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom”
― Herman Hesse

“I would traverse not once more, but often the hell of my inner being. 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, Steppenwolf

“He had thought more than other men, and in matters of the intellect he had that calm objectivity, that certainty of thought and knowledge, such as only really intellectual men have, who have no axe to grind, who never wish to shine, or to talk others down, or to appear always in the right.”
― Herman Hesse

“...Haller's sickness of the soul, as I now know, is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs, a sickness, it seems, that by no means attacks the weak and worthless only but, rather, precisely those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Like a true Nature's child, we were born, born to be wild”
― Steppenwolf

“I don’t write literature but simply confessions, just as a drowning man or a man dying of poisoning no longer worries about the state of his hair or the modulation of his voice, but instead simply lets out a scream.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“There is much to be said for contentment and painlessness, for these bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain nor pleasure is audible, but pass by whispering and on tip-toe. But the worst of it is that it is just this contentment that I cannot endure. After a short time it fills me with irrepressible hatred and nausea. In desperation I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or, if that cannot be, on the road to pain. When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my mouldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols, to provide a few rebellious schoolboys with the longed-for ticket to Hamburg, or to stand one or two representatives of the established order on their heads. For 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, Steppenwolf

“How foolish to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence. It has been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.”
― Hermann Hesse

“The saints, these are the true men, the younger brothers of the savior. We are with them all our lives through every good deed every brave thought in every love...There are many saints who at first were sinners. Even sin can be a way to saintliness, sin and vice...Ah, Harry 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.”
― Herman Hesse

“This Steppenwolf of ours has always been aware of at least the Faustian two-fold nature within him. He has discovered that the one-fold of the body is not inhabited by a one-fold of the soul, and that at best he is only at the beginning of a long pilgrimage towards this ideal harmony. He would like either to overcome the wolf and become wholly man or to renounce mankind and at last to live wholly a wolf's life. It may be presumed that he has never carefully watched a real wolf. Had he done so he would have seen, perhaps, that even animals are not undivided in spirit. With them, too, the well-knit beauty of the body hides a being of manifold states and strivings. The wolf, too, has his abysses. The wolf, too, suffers. No, back to nature is a false track that leads nowhere but to suffering and despair. Harry can never turn back again and become wholly wolf, and could he do so he would find that even the wolf is not of primeval simplicity, but already a creature of manifold complexity. Even the wolf has two, and more than two, souls in his wolf's breast, and he who desires to be a wolf falls into the same forgetfulness as the man who sings: "If I could be a child once more!" He who sentimentally sings of blessed childhood is thinking of the return to nature and innocence and the origin of things, and has quite forgotten that these blessed children are beset with conflict and complexities and capable of all suffering.
There is, in fact, no way back either to the wolf or to the child. From the very start there is no innocence and no singleness. Every created thing, even the simplest, is already guilty, already multiple. It has been thrown into the muddy stream of being and may never more swim back again to its source. The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life. Nor will suicide really solve your problem, unhappy Steppenwolf. You will, instead, embark on the longer and wearier and harder road of life. You will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace. This is the road that Buddha and every great man has gone, whether consciously or not, insofar as fortune favored his quest. All births mean 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.”
― Herman Hesse

“Just as I dress and go out to visit the professor and exchange a few more or less insincere
compliments with him, without really wanting to at all, so it is with the majority of men day by
day and hour by hour in their daily lives and affairs. 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 it is this never-ceasing 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. Let no one think that I blame other men, though now and then in these pages I scorn and even deride them, or that I accuse them of the responsibility of my personal misery. But now that I have come so far, and standing as I do on the extreme verge of life where the ground falls away before me into bottomless darkness, I should do wrong and I should lie if I pretended to myself or to others that that machine still revolved for me and that I was still obedient to the eternal child's play of that charming world.”
― Herman Hesse

“You have a picture of life within you, a faith, a challenge, and you were ready for deeds and sufferings and sacrifices, and then you became aware by degrees that the world asked no deeds and no sacrifices of you whatever, and that life is no poem of heroism with heroic parts to play and so on, but a comfortable room where people are quite content with eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, cards and radio music. And whoever wants more and has got it in him - the heroic and the beautiful, and the reverence for the great poets or for the saints - is a fool and a Don Quixote.”
― Herman Hesse

“We intellectuals, instead of fighting against this tendency like men, and rendering obedience to the spirit, the Logos, the Word, and gaining a hearing for it, are all dreaming of a speech without words that utters inexpressible and gives form to the formless.”
― Herman Hesse

“[…] he still closes his eyes to the truth, refusing to acknowledge that clinging desperately to the notion of self, desperately wanting not to die, is the surest route to eternal death. On the other hand, the ability to die, to slough off one’s skin like a snake, to commit oneself to incessant self-transformation is what leads the way to immortality.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Vienatvė - tai nepriklausomybė, aš jos norėjau ir įsigijau per ilgus metus. Ji buvo šalta, o taip, bet ji buo tyli, nepaprastai tyli ir didelė tarsi šalta nebyli erdvė, kurioje sukasi žvaigždės.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Ir netgi nelaimingiausiam gyvenime pasitaiko saulėtų valandų ir mažyčių laimės gėlių tarp smėlio ir akmenų.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“All of a sudden there was a human being, a living human being, to shatter the death that had come down over me like a glass case, and to put out a hand to me, a good and beautiful and warm hand.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“What we think of as acts of cruelty are in reality nothing of the kind. Someone from the Middle Ages would still find the whole style of our present-day life abhorrent, but cruel, horrifying and barbaric in a quite different way. Every age, every culture, every ethos and tradition has a style of its own, has the varieties of gentleness and harshness, of beauty and cruelty that are appropriate to it. Each age will take certain kinds of suffering for granted, will patiently accept certain wrongs. Human life becomes a real hell of suffering only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. Required to live in the Middle Ages, someone from the Graeco-Roman period would have died a wretched death by suffocation, just as a savage inevitably would in the midst our civilisation. Now, there are times when a whole generation gets caught to such an extent between two eras, two styles of life, that nothing comes naturally to it since it has lost all sense of morality, security and innocence. A man of Nietzsche's mettle had to endure our present misery more than a generation in advance. Today, thousands are enduring what he had to suffer alone and without being understood.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Can’t you get into your head, my learned friend, that you’ve taken a liking to me and feel that I matter because I’m a kind of mirror for you, because something in me responds to you and understands you? Actually, all human beings ought to be such mirrors for one another, responding and corresponding to each other in this way, but the thing is that cranks like you are oddities. You easily get lead astray, bewitched into thinking that you can no longer see or read anything in the eyes of other people, that there is nothing there that concerns you any more. And when a crank of your sort suddenly discovers a face again that really looks at him, in which he senses something akin to a response and an affinity, it naturally fills him with joy.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Wenn nun der Gärtner dieses Gartens keine andre botanische Unterscheidung kennt als «eßbar» und «Unkraut», dann wird er mit neun Zehnteln seines Gartens nichts anzufangen wissen, er wird die zauberhaftesten Blumen ausreißen, die edelsten Bäume abhauen oder wird sie doch hassen und scheel ansehen.”
― Hermann Hesse

“The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“The thing he most compulsively desired, most stubbornly searched and strove for, was granted to him, but more abundantly than is good for a human being. Initially all he dreamed of and wished for, it later became his bitter lot. Those who live for power are destroyed by power, those who live for money by money; service is the ruin of the servile, pleasure the ruin of the pleasure-seeker. Thus it was Steppenwolf's independence that proved his downfall.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Stepių Vilkas, atkyldęs į mūsų miestus, į kamenės gyvenimą - joks kitas vaizdas taip įtikinamai neparodys, koks šis žmogus baugštus, vienišas, koks laukinis, neramus, kaip pasiilgęs tėvynės ir kaip jam jos trūksta.”
― Hesse Herman

“<...> girdi, kaip už langų gyvena pasualis ir žmonės, žino, kad yra nuo jų atsiskyręs, bet nesižudo, nes tikėjimo likutis jam sako, jog turi širdimi iki galo patirti šią kančią, šią baisią kančią ir mirti turi nuo šios kančios.”
― Hesse Herman

“<...> kas yra matęs tų pragariškų dienų, tas labai patenkintas tokiomis paprastomis, pusėtinomis dienomis kaip ši diena <...>.”
― Hesse Herman

“Puikus dalykas - pasitenkinimas, neskausmingumas, šios pakenčiamos, romios dienos, kai nei skausmas nei džiaugsmas nedrįsta suklykti, kai viskas vien šnabždasi ir sėlina ant pirštų galų.”
― Hermann Hesse

“Wenn nun
der Gärtner dieses Gartens keine andre botanische Unterscheidung
kennt als «eßbar» und «Unkraut», dann wird er mit neun Zehnteln seines
Gartens nichts anzufangen wissen, er wird die zauberhaftesten Blumen
ausreißen, die edelsten Bäume abhauen oder wird sie doch hassen und
scheel ansehen.”
― Hesse Hermann