Zack Keith

“Look into the fire, look into the clouds, and as soon as your presentiments come and the voices in your soul begin to speak, surrender yourself to them and don’t start off by asking whether that suits or pleases your teacher, your father, or some God or other! If you do that, you’ll ruin yourself.”
― 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

“We marked men were not at all worried about the shape the future would take. To us every credo, every doctrine of salvation seemed stillborn and useless. And there was only one thing we conceived as our duty and destiny: for each of us to become so completely himself, so completely in harmony with the creative germ of Nature within himself, living in accordance with its commands, that the uncertain future would find us ready for any eventuality, whatever it might bring.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian

“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