“Demian is an example of the artist's miraculous power of surviving a mental earthquake... It is a question of self-realization. It is not enough to accept a concept of order and live by it; that is cowardice, and such cowardice cannot result in freedom. Chaos must be faced. Real order must be preceded by a descent into chaos. This is Hesse's conclusion.”

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“Art is thought, and thought only gives the world an appearance of order to anyone weak enough to be convinced by its show.”

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“Considered as a whole, Hesse's achievement can hardly be matched in modern literature... Hesse has little imagination in the sense that Shakespeare or Tolstoy can be said to have imagination, but his ideas have a vitality that more than makes up for it. Before all, he is a novelist who used the novel to explore the problem: What should we do with our lives? The man who is interested to know how he should live instead of merely taking life as it comes, is automatically an Outsider.”

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“Humanism is only another name for spiritual laziness, or a vague half-creed adopted by men of science and logicians whose heads are too occupied with the world of mathematics and physics to worry about religious categories.”

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“Nietzsche was, in short, a religious mystic... Nietzsche understood that society is a hall of distorting mirrors.”

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“no act is evil in itself; man puts the evil into it by the motive with which he commits it... Evil cannot coexist without the striving to 'live more abundantly' which is the ultimate aim of religion.”

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“One of the most striking of Ramakrishna's teachings is the belief in the unity of all religions... We—among the complexities of our modern civilization—are forced to develop hard shells... Ramakrishna, at the opposite extreme, could plunge to a depth of imaginative ecstasy which few Westerners have ever known”

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“Self-expression is impossible in relation with other men; their self-expression interferes with it. The greatest heights of self-expression in poetry, music, painting—are achieved by men who are supremely alone.”

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“The Buddha advocated a 'middle way' yet this was only after a preliminary course of extremes... As to the way of escaping delusion, there is no division of opinion: Go to extremes. That is the first necessity.”

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“The Outsider has his proper place in the Order of Society, as the impractical dreamer.”

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“The Outsider has his proper place in the Order of Society, as the impractical dreamer.”

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“The Outsider is always unhappy, but he is an agent that ensures the happiness for millions of 'Insiders'.”

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“The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love words or men who love living.”

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“They change their shirts every day, but never their conception of themselves... These men are in prison... caged animals who have never known freedom; but it is a prison all the same.”

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