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“Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any other time before, and men – each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature – are therefore shot wholesale nowadays. If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose. But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every man’s story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross. Few people nowadays know what man is. Many sense this ignorance and die the more easily because of it, the same way that I will die more easily once I have completed this story. I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books. I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams – like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves. Each man’s life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. Yet each one strives to become that – one is an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way, each as best as he can. Each man carries the vestiges of his birth – the slime and eggshells of his primeval past – with him to the end of his days. Some never become human, remaining frog, lizard, ant. Some are human above the waist, fish below. Each represents a gamble on the part of nature in creation of the human. We all share the same origin, our mothers; all of us come in at the same door. But each of us – experiments of the depths – strives toward his own destiny. We can understand one another; but each of us is able to interpret himself to himself alone.” -Herman Hesse, Demian

“It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other’s opposite and complement.”


-Herman Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

“A true seeker could not accept any teachings, not if he sincerely wished to find something. But he who had found, could give his approval to every path, every goal; nothing separated him from all of the other thousands who lived in eternity, who breathed the Divine.”


“There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge — that is everywhere, that is Atman, that is in me and you and in every creature, and I am beginning to believe that this knowledge has no worse enemy than the man of knowledge, than learning.”


-Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

“Don’t ask, ‘Is my attitude toward life the right one?’ —to that question there is no answer. Every attitude is as right as every other, all are a part of life. Ask instead, ‘Since I am as I am, since I have these particular needs and problems which seem to be spared so many others, what must I do in order to bear life, nevertheless, and if possible make something good of it?’ If you really listen to your innermost voice, the answer will be something like this:  ‘Since I am as I am, I should neither envy nor despise others for being different. I should not ask whether my being is ‘right,’ but accept my soul and its needs just as I accept my body, my name, my origins:  as something given and inescapable, which I must say yes to and stand up for even if the whole world should oppose it.’” - Herman Hesse