Zack Keith

“We always limit our personality much too narrowly! We always count as pertaining to our person only what we recognize as individual differences that set us apart. But we’re comprised of everything that comprises the world, each of us, and just as our body bears within it the lines of evolutionary descent all the way back to the fish and even much farther beyond that, in the same way our soul contains everything that has ever dwelt in human souls. All the gods and devils that ever existed, whether among the Greeks, Chinese, or Zulus, are all inside us, they exist there as possibilities, as wishes, as ways of escape. If mankind died out except for a single halfway-gifted child that had received no education, that child would rediscover the whole course of events, it would be able to produce again the gods, demons, Edens, positive and negative commandments, the Old and the New Testament.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian

“Even innocuous people are hardly spared from coming into conflict, one time or more in their life, with the lovely virtues of piety and gratitude. Everyone must at some time take the step that separates him from his father, from his teachers; everyone must taste a little of the toughness of solitude, even though most people can’t stand much of it and soon knuckle under again.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian

“Let the students frequent their taverns and tattoo their faces; let the world be rotten and await its destruction—what was that to me? I was waiting solely for my destiny to come face to face with me in a new guise.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian

“The kind of community we have now is merely herd instinct. People run to one another for shelter because they’re afraid of one another—capitalists stick together, workers stick together, scholars stick together! And why are they afraid? A person is afraid only when he isn’t at one with himself. They’re afraid because they have never accepted themselves.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian