36 Quotes About Steppenwolf

I might be a beast astray, with no sense of its environment, yet there was some meaning in my foolish life, something in me gave an answer and was the receiver of those distant calls from worlds far above. In my brain were stored a thousand pictures...

We intellectuals, instead of fighting against this tendency like men, and rendering obedience to the spirit, the Logos, the Word, and gaining a hearing for it, are all dreaming of a speech without words that utters inexpressible and gives form to the formless.

Solitude is independence.

Your life will not be flat and dull eventhough you know that your war will never be victorious. It is far flatter, Harry, to fight for something goodand ideal and to know all the time that you are bound to attain it. Are ideals attainable? Do we live toabolish death? No--we live to fear it and then again to love it, and just for death's sake it is that our sparkof life glows for an hour now and then so brightly.

A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to committ outrages…

madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom

What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life

You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.

A mere nothing suffices — and the lightning strikes.