Demian

by Hermann Hesse

I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I’m beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me.

Whoever is too comfort-loving to do his own thinking and be his own judge simply adapts to the pre-existing negative commandments. It’s easy for him. Others feel commandments of their own within themselves; for them things are forbidden which every respectable man does daily, and other things are permissible for them which are normally tabooed. Everyone must stand on his own feet.”

Nietzsche.

Novalis,

“Combining the godlike and the devilish,”

But my nature was never much inclined toward this sort of direct, conscious searching, in which at first you only find truths that lie in your hands like lifeless stones.

There was only one thing I couldn’t do: tear out the obscurely hidden aim within me and visualize it somewhere before my eyes, as others did, those who knew precisely that they wanted to become a professor, judge, doctor, or artist, who knew how long that would take them and what benefits it would bring them. I couldn’t do that.

All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?

Sometimes, too, all this seemed unbearably painful to me, and I was mentally prepared to take my life at some point.

At that time I found a peculiar refuge—by “accident,” as people say. But there are no such accidents. When someone who badly needs something finds it, it isn’t an accident that brings it his way, but he himself, his own desire and necessity lead him to it.

“We always limit our personality much too narrowly! We always count as pertaining to our person only what we recognize as individual differences that set us apart. But we’re comprised of everything that comprises the world, each of us, and just as our body bears within it the lines of evolutionary descent all the way back to the fish and even much farther beyond that, in

the same way our soul contains everything that has ever dwelt in human souls.

Right now I can remember a marvelous example. I had a dream in which I was able to fly, but in such a way that to some degree I was catapulted through the air by some mighty impetus that I couldn’t control. The sensation of that flight was uplifting, but soon turned to fear when I found myself hurled into dangerous heights involuntarily. Then I made the relieving discovery that I could

regulate my rise and fall by holding my breath and releasing it again.

Pistorius, who was a full-fledged eccentric himself, taught me to keep up my courage and self-respect. By constantly finding something of value in my words, dreams, fantasies, and ideas, by constantly taking them seriously and discussing them earnestly, he set me an example.

You sometimes think you’re peculiar, you reproach yourself for going other ways than most people. You’ve got to get that out of your head. Look into the fire, look into the clouds, and as soon as your presentiments come and the voices in your soul begin to speak, surrender yourself to them and don’t start off by asking whether that suits or pleases your teacher, your father, or some God or other! If you do that, you’ll ruin yourself. That way you get on the sidewalk and you become a fossil.

Abraxas has no objections to any of your thoughts or any of your dreams. Never forget that. But he’ll abandon you if you ever become faultless and normal. Then he’ll abandon you and look for a new pot to cook his ideas in.”

He should be afraid of nothing and consider nothing taboo that the soul within us desires.”

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. That’s why

most people’s lives are so unreal, because they consider the external images to be real and don’t allow their own world within themselves to tell them anything.

They can be happy that way. But when a person once knows the other way, he is no longer free to choose the path that most people follow. Sinclair, the path of th...

There was no duty for enlightened people, none, none, except this: to seek themselves, to become certain of themselves, to grope forward along their own path, wherever it might lead.—I

Everyone had only one true vocation: to find himself.

His business was to discover his own destiny, not just any destiny, and to live it totally and undividedly. Anything else was just a half-measure, an attempt to run away, an escape back to the ideal of the masses, an adaptation, fear of one’s own nature.

I was a gamble of Nature, a throw

of the dice into an uncertain realm, leading perhaps to something new, perhaps to nothing; and to let this throw from the primordial depths take effect, to feel it will inside myself and adopt it completely as my own will: that alone was my vocation. That alone!

The person who truly wants nothing except his destiny no longer has others of his own kind; he stands completely alone and has only the chill of outer space around him.

The person who desires nothing else but destiny no longer has either models or ideals, nothing dear to him, nothing to console him! And that is the right path to follow.

People like you and me are really lonely, it’s true, but we still have one another, we have the secret satisfaction of being different, of rebelling, of desiring the unusual. That, too, must fall by the wayside if a person wants to follow the path to its end. He mustn’t even desire to be a revolutionary, a role model, or a martyr. It’s beyond imagining—”

vivify

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

don’t want to make a gift of myself, I want to be won.”

He had loved and, by doing so, had found himself. But most people love in order to lose themselves.