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Steppenwolf

Book by Hermann Hesse · 26 quotes · Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse, Hesse

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Steppenwolf Quotes

“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.”

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“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.”

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“The morning was a wretched time of day for him. He feared it and it never brought him any good. On no morning of his life had he ever been in good spirits nor done any good before midday, nor ever had a happy idea, nor devised any pleasure for himself or others. By degrees during the afternoon he warmed and became alive, and only towards evening, on his good days, was he productive active and sometimes, aglow with joy.”

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“[…] 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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“Your life will not be flat and dull even though you know that your war will never be victorious. It is far flatter, Harry, to fight for something good and ideal and to know all the time that you are bound to attain it. Are ideals attainable? Do we live to abolish death? No--we live to fear it and then again to love it, and just for death's sake it is that our spark of life glows for an hour now and then so brightly.”

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“Yaşam konusunda bir fikrin vardı; içinde bir inanç, bir beklenti yaşıyordu; eylemlere, acılara ve özverilere hazırdın. Ama yavaş yavaş anladın ki, dünya hiç de senden eylemlerde ve özverilerde bulunmanı istemiyor; yaşam, kahraman rollerine ve benzeri şeylere yer veren bir kahramanlık destanı değil, insanların yiyip içmeler, kahve yudumlamalar, örgü örmeler, iskambil oynamalar ve radyo dinlemelerle yetinip hallerine şükrettikleri rahat bir orta sınıf evidir.”

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“Man designs for himself a garden with a hundred kinds of trees, a thousand kinds of flowers, a hundred kinds of fruit and vegetables. Suppose, then, that the gardener of this garden knew no other distinction between edible and inedible, nine-tenths of this garden would be useless to him. He would pull up the most enchanting flowers and hew down the noblest trees and even regard them with a loathing and envious eye. This is what the Steppenwolf does with the thousand flowers of his soul. What does not stand classified as either man or wolf he does not see at all.”

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“Man is not by any means of fixed and enduring form (this, in spite of suspicions to the contrary on the part of their wise men, was the ideal of the ancients). He is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit. His innermost destiny drives him on to the spirit and to God. His innermost longing draws him back to nature, the mother. Between the two forces his life hangs tremulous and irresolute.”

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