Demian: A Novel

by Hermann Hesse

People with courage and character are always called peculiar by other people.

Alas, I know that today: nothing in the world is so distasteful to man as to go the way which leads him to himself!

I love this. This has been my journey. I accepted long ago the journey to myself. I have long avoided the weight of what one may see along this way, and it has rewarded me with beauty, but also suffering.

You knew that your ‘world of sanction’ was simply one-half of the world, and yet you tried to suppress the other half in you, as do the parsons and teachers. You will not succeed. No one succeeds who has once begun to think.”

The damnation of self-awareness

I have read it somewhere—the life of a profligate is one of the best preparations for a mystic. There are always such people as Saint Augustine, who become seers. Before, he was a sort of rake and profligate.”

“The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever will be born must destroy a world. The bird flies to God. The name of the god is Abraxas.”

The contemplation of such shapes, the surrendering of oneself to these irrational, twisting, odd forms of nature, engenders in us a feeling of the harmony of our inner being with the will which brought forth these shapes; we soon feel the temptation to look upon them as our own creations, as if made by our own moods; we see the boundary between ourselves and nature waver and vanish; we learn to know the state of mind by outside impressions, or by inward. In no way so simply and so easily as by this practice do we discover to what a great extent we are creators, to what a great extent our souls have part in the continual creation of the world. Or rather, it is the same indivisible godhead, which is active in us and in nature. If the outside world fell in ruins, one of us would be capable of building it up again, for mountain and stream, tree and leaf, root and blossom, all that is shaped by nature lies modeled in us, comes from the soul, whose essence is eternity, of whose essence we are ignorant, but which is revealed to us for the most part as love-force and creative power.

When we hate a man, we hate in him something which resides in us ourselves. What is not in us does not move us.”

One is only afraid when one is not at one with oneself. They are afraid because they have never had the courage to be themselves.

“Love must not beg,” she said, “nor demand either. Love must have the force to be absolutely certain of itself. Then it is attracted no longer, but attracts. Sinclair, I am attracting your love. As soon as you attract my love, I shall come. I do not want to make a present of myself. I want to be won.”