Demian: A Novel

“I see that you think more than you can express. But if that is so, then you also know that you have never lived in experience all that you have thought, and that is not good. Only the thought that we live through in experience has any value. You knew that your ‘world of sanction’ was simply one-half of the world, and yet you tried to suppress the

“It is always hard, to be born. You know, it is not without effort that the bird comes out of the egg.

I recollected what Pistorius had said to me. But however much I felt his words to be right I could not pass them on. I could not give advice which did not result from my own experience, advice the observance of which I did not yet feel myself equal to.

“Love must not beg,” she said, “nor demand either. Love must have the force to be absolutely certain of itself. Then it is attracted no longer, but attracts. Sinclair, I am attracting your love. As soon as you attract my love, I shall come. I do not want to make a present of myself. I want to be won.”

The man you would like to kill is never really Mr. So-and-So, that is really only a disguise. When we hate a man, we hate in him something which resides in us ourselves. What is not in us does not move us.”

At that time I found a peculiar refuge—by “chance,” as one says. But really such happenings cannot be attributed to chance. When a person is in need of something, and the necessary happens, this is not due to chance but to himself; his own desire leads him compellingly to the object of which he stands in need.

Sometimes all this seemed to torture me unbearably, and I was quite prepared to take my own life some day.

If we were nothing more than individuals, we could actually be put out of the world entirely with a musket-ball, and in that case there would be no more sense in relating stories. But each man is not only himself, he is also the unique, quite special, and in every case the important and remarkable point where the world’s phenomena converge, in a ce

Only one thing I could not do: Discover the dark, concealed aim within me and make up my mind, as others did—others, who knew well enough whether they wanted to be professors or judges, doctors or artists. They knew what career to follow and what advantages they would gain by it. But I was not like that. Perhaps I would be like them some day, but h