Demian

by Hermann Hesse

We can understand one another, but each of us can only interpret himself.

It is of these experiences, invisible to everyone, that the inner, essential line of our destiny consists.

For the first time I tasted death, and death tastes bitter because it is birth, it is anxiety and terror in the face of a frightening innovation.

nothing in the world is more repugnant to a man than following the path that leads him to himself!

When an animal or person focuses all his attention and all his willpower on a given objective, he achieves it.

“A man’s fate and his character are two names for the same concept.” Now I had understood it. I still often ran across the girl I called Beatrice. I no longer felt any agitation when I did, but always a gentle harmony of minds, an emotional presentiment: you are linked to me, but not you yourself, only your picture; you are a portion of my fate.

“The bird is fighting its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wishes to be born must destroy a world. The bird is flying to God. The god is named Abraxas.”

Only gradually and unconsciously was a connection established between that exclusively mental picture and the hint about the god I must seek that had come to me from outside. But then the connection became tighter and more intimate, and I began to notice that, in that very dream of premonition, I was invoking Abraxas. Rapture and terror, man and woman combined, the most sacred and the most hideous things interwoven, deep guilt quivering in the heart of the gentlest innocence—such was the image of my dream of love, and such was Abraxas, also. Love was no longer an obscure animal urge, as I had conceived it anxiously at the beginning, nor was it any longer a spiritualized pious worship, such as I had offered to the image of Beatrice. It was both, both and much more still, it was an angelic image and Satan, man and woman in one, human being and animal, the highest good and extreme evil. To experience this seemed to be my lot; to taste of it, my destiny. I longed for it and feared it, but it was always there, always hovering over me.

When we hate a person, what we hate in his image is something inside ourselves. Whatever isn’t inside us can’t excite us.”

“The things we see,” Pistorius said quietly, “are the same things that are in us. The only reality is the one we have in us.

“No one ever arrives home,” she said amiably. “But when the paths of friends meet, the whole world looks like home for a while.”