You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.

(Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), German novelist, poet. Father Jacobus, in The Glass Bead Game, ch. 4 (1943, trans. 1960).)

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, young man, and possibly a tragic one.

(Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), German novelist, poet. Father Jacobus, in The Glass Bead Game, ch. 4 (1943, trans. 1960).)

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.

(Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), German novelist, poet. "For Madmen Only," Steppenwolf (1927).)

In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified.

(Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), German novelist, poet. Narrator (Sinclair), in Demian, prologue (1960).)

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.

(Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), German novelist, poet. Steppenwolf, "For Madmen Only," (1927).)

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

(Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), German novelist, poet. Letter, 1950. "Montagnola," Hermann Hesse: A Pictorial Biography, ed. Volker Michels (1973).)

The bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self.... And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire.

(Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), German novelist, poet. "Treatise on the Steppenwolf," Steppenwolf (1927).)

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

(Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), German novelist, poet. Sinclair, in Demian, ch. 5 (1960).)

In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified.

(Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), German novelist, poet. Sinclair, in Demian, prologue (1960). Sinclair is the narrator.)

Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and cruelties; it accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.

(Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), German novelist, poet. Steppenwolf, preface (1927).)