I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray that finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.
You force me to tell you with words; I could say it a thousand times better without words. With words I can give you nothing! With words I can’t learn from you, nor you from me.
Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence. Naturally, every one does not feel this equally strongly.
The world tasted bitter. Life was torture.
You know, when a music student is lazy and doesn’t like hard work, he always takes up composing. Anyone can do that, and each one, of course, is a genius.
I haven’t thought of this yet, sir. For more than three years, I have been without possessions, and have never thought about of what I should live.” “So you’ve lived of the possessions of others.” “Presumable this is how it is. After all, a merchant also lives of what other people own.
My advice to the person suffering from lack of time and from apathy is this: Seek out each day as many as possible of the small joys, and thriftily save up the larger, more demanding pleasures for holidays and appropriate hours. It is the small joys first of all that are granted us for recreation, for daily relief and disburdenment, not the great ones.
Man, we feel in the presence of such mighty maxims, is not an animal; he is not a determinate, finite entity, not a being completed once and for all, but a coming-into-being, a project, a dream of the future, a yearning of nature for new forms and possibilities.
From the bowed crowns of ancient trees simple soft human beauty spoke pure poems and symphonies; a world of noble intimations and charmingly civilized delights.
In respect to mankind we all of us have but one task. To help mankind as a whole make some small advance, to better a particular institution, to do away with one particular mode of killing – all these are commendable, but they are not my task and yours. Our task as men is this: in our own unique personal lives, to take a short step on the road from animal to man.
People should always ask questions, they should always entertain doubts.
You created difficulties for me, but I am no enemy of difficulties. I’ve learned from them, I’ve partly overcome them.
Genius is not so rare as we sometimes think; nor, certainly, so frequent as may appear from history books or, indeed, from the newspapers.
The bandaging hurt. Everything that has happened to me since has hurt. But sometimes, when I find the key and climb fully down into myself, where the images of destiny slumber in their dark mirrror, I need only bend down over the black mirror and I see my own image, which now looks exactly like Him, Him, my friend and my guide.
We are transitory, we are becoming, we are potentials; there is no perfection for us, no complete being. But whatever we go, from potential to deed, from possibility to realization, we participate in true being, become by a degree more similar to the perfect and divine. That is what it means to realize oneself.
You are a poet, not because you write stories, but because you understand and love nature. It doesn’t matter to most people that the wind sings in the trees or a mountain shimmers in the sunlight. But you find life in all this, a life you can partake of.
From the very start there is no innocence and no singleness. Every created thing, even the simplest, is already guilty, already multiple. It has been thrown into the muddy stream of being and may never more swim back again to its source. The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life.
In the meaning of many sayings of Nietzsche, he had created within himself an ingenious, a boundless and frightful capacity for pain. I saw at the same time that the root of his pessimism was not world-contempt but self-contempt; for however mercilessly he might annihilate institutions and persons in his talk he never spared himself.
Next to the hunger to experience a thing, men have perhaps no stronger hunger than to forget.
We who wore the sign might justly be considered “odd” by the world; yes, even crazy, and dangerous. We were aware or in the process of becoming aware and our striving was directed toward achieving a more and more complete state of awareness while the striving of others was a quest aimed at binding their own opinions, ideals, duties, their lives and fortunes more and more closely to those of the herd.
We love the sciences and scholarly disciplines, each his own, and yet we know that devotion to a discipline does not necessarily preserve a man from selfishness, vice, and absurdity.