Post by dudetyson on Aug 29, 2011 20:12:42 GMT -6
These are quotes from the book that has probably influenced me more than anything else in the world. A beautiful, ruthless text.
“Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again.”
“My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams – like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.”
Max Demian re-interpreting the story of Cain and Abel:
“Here was a man with something in his face that frightened the others. They didn’t dare lay hands on him; he impressed them, he and his childen. We can guess – no, we can be quite certain – that it was not a mark on his forehead like a postmark – life is hardly ever as clear and straightforward as that. It is much more likely that he struck people as faintly sinister, perhaps a little more intellect and boldness in his look than people were used to. This man was powerful: you would approach him only with awe. He had a ‘sign.’ You could explain this any way you wished. And people always want what is agreeable to them and puts them in the right. They were afraid of Cain’s children: they bore a ‘sign.’ So they did not interpret the sign for what it was – a mark of distinction – but as its opposite. They said, ‘Those fellows with the sign, they’re a strange lot’ – and indeed they were. People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest. It was a scandal that a breed of fearless and sinister people ran about freely, so they attached a nickname and a myth to these people to get even with them, to make up for the many times they had felt afraid.”
“The point is that this God of both Old and New Testaments is certainly an extraordinary figure but not what he purports to represents. He is all that is good, noble, fatherly, beautiful, elevated, sentimental – true! But the world consists of something else besides. And what is left over is ascribed to the devil, this entire slice of world, this entire half is suppressed and hushed up. In exactly the same way they praise God as the father of all life but simply refuse to say a word about our sexual life on which it’s all based, describing it whenever possible as sinful, the work of the devil. I have no objection to worshiping this God Jehovah, far from it. But I mean we ought to consider everything sacred, the entire world, not merely this artificially separated half! Thus alongside the divine service we should also have a service for the devil. I feel that would be right. Otherwise you must create for yourself a God that contains the devil too…”
Max Demian’s thoughts on the thieves crucified next to Christ:
“…this sentimental little treatise about the good thief. At first he was a thorough scoundrel, had committed all those awful things and God knows what else, and now he dissolves in tears and celebrates such a tearful feast of self-improvement and remorse! What’s the sense of repenting if you’re two steps from the grave? I ask you. Once again it’s nothing but a priest’s fairy tale, saccharine and dishonest, touched up by touched up with sentimentality and given a highly edifying background. If you had to pick a friend from between the two thieves or decide which of the two you had rather trust, you most certainly wouldn’t select that sniveling convert. No, the other fellow, he’s a man of character. He doesn’t give a hoot for ‘conversion,’ which to a man in his position can’t be anything but a pretty speech. He follows his destiny to its appointed end and does not turn coward and forswear the devil, who has aided and abetted him until then. He has character, and people with character tend to receive the short end of the stick in biblical stories. Perhaps he’s even a descendent of Cain…”
“Only the ideas that we actually live are of any value. You knew all along that your sanctioned world was only half the world and you tried to suppress the second half the same way the priests and teachers do. You won’t succeed. No one succeeds in this once he has begun to think.”
“It’s possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard. And vice versa. Actually it’s only a question of convenience. Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them; things are forbidden to them that every honorable man will do any day in the year and other things are allowed to them that are generally despised. Each person must stand on his own feet.”
“We talk too much…clever talk is absolutely worthless. All you do in the process is lose yourself. And to lose yourself is a sin. One has to be able to crawl completely inside oneself, like a tortoise.”
“I could not have cared less what became of me. In my odd and unattractive fashion, going to bars and bragging was my way of quarreling with the world – this was my way of protesting. I was ruining myself in the process but at times I understood the situation as follows: if the world had no use for people like me, if it did not have a better place and higher tasks for them, well, in that case, people like me would go to pot, and the loss would be the world’s.”
“Although I never addressed a single word to Beatrice, she exerted a profound influence on me at that time. She raised her image before me, gave me access to a holy shrine, she transformed me into a worshiper in a temple…
By consecrating myself to her I consecrated myself to the spirit and to the gods.”
“Not that the picture resembled me – I did not feel that it should – but it was what determined my life, it was my inner self, my fate or my daemon. That’s what my friend would look like if I were to find one ever again. That’s what the woman I would love would look like if ever I were to love one. That’s what my life and death would be like, this was the tone and rhythm of my fate.”
“The life of a hedonist is the best preparation for becoming a mystic.”
“It’s good to realize that within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than ourselves.”
“I could not have written Demian even if I had known his address. I decided, however – in the same state of dreamlike presentiment in which I did everything – to send him the painting of the sparrow hawk.”
“The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God’s name is Abraxas.”
“We may conceive of the name as that of a godhead whose symbolic task is the uniting of godly and devilish elements.”
“The dream, the most important and enduringly significant of my life, went something like this: I was returning to my father’s house…in the house itself was my mother coming toward me – but as I entered and wanted to embrace her, it was not she but a form I had never set eyes on before, tall and strong, resembling Max Demian…This form drew me to itself and enveloped me in a deep, tremulous embrace. I felt a mixture of ecstasy and horror – the embrace was at once an act of divine worship and a crime. Too many associations with my mother and friend commingled with this figure embracing me. Its embrace violated all sense of reverence, yet it was bliss.”
“I now lived within a fire of unsatisfied longing, of tense expectancy that often drove me completely wild.”
“However, I was well-armed against the outside world. I was no longer afraid of people; even my fellow students had come to know this and treated me with a secret respect that often brought a smile to my lips. If I wanted to I could see through most of them and startled them occasionally. Only I rarely or never tried. I was always preoccupied with myself.”
“All of this music said the same thing, all of it expressed what was in the musician’s soul: longing, a most intimate atonement with the world and a violent wrenching loose, a burning hearkening to one’s own dark soul, an intoxicating surrender and deep curiosity about the miraculous.”
“Completely unreserved music, the kind that makes you feel that a man is shaking heaven and hell. I believe I love that kind of music because it is amoral.”
“As a young boy I had been in the habit of gazing at bizarre natural phenomenon…the surrender to Nature’s irrational, strangely confused formations produces in us a feeling of inner harmony with the force responsible for these phenomena. We soon fall prey to the temptation of thinking of them as being our own moods, our own creations, and see the boundaries separating us from Nature begin to quiver and dissolve. We become acquainted with that state of mind in which we are unbable to decide whether the images on our retina are the result of impressions coming from without of from within. Nowhere as in this exercise can we discover so easily and simply to what extent we are creative, to what extent our soul partakes of the constant creation of the world.”
“I dreamed I was able to fly, but in such a way that I seemed catapulted into the air and lost all control. The feeling of flying exhilarated me, but exhilaration turned to fear when I saw myself driven higher and higher, becoming more and more powerless. At that instant I made the saving discovery that I could regulate the rise or fall of my flight by holding or releasing my breath.”
“Each man had only one genuine vocation – to find the way to himself. He might end up as a poet or a madman, as a prophet or a criminal – that was not his affair, ultimately it was of no concern.”
REGARDING PRIESTHOOD
“A priest does not want to convert, he merely wants to live among believers, among his own kind. He wants to be the instrument and expression for the feeling from which we create our gods.”
(I recently heard on Christian radio that, it is important to hear the word of God spoken by others, not to simply be the voice that speaks it to others.)
“My friend, our new religion, for which we have chosen the name Abraxas, is beautiful. It is the best we have. But it is still a fledgling. Its wings haven’t grown yet. A lonely religion isn’t right either. There has to be a community, there must be a cult and intoxication, feasts and mysteries…”
“Live those dreams, plays with them, build altars to them…Whether you and I and a few others will renew the world someday remains to be seen. But within ourselves we must renew it every day, otherwise we just aren’t serious.”
“Startled, I countered: ‘But you can’t do everything that comes to your mind! You can’t kill someone because you detest him.’
He moved closer to me.
‘Under certain circumstances, even that.’”
“If you happen to think of something truly mad or sinful again, if you want to kill someone or want to commit some enormity, Sinclair, think at that moment that it is Abraxas fantasizing within you!”
“Ever since the night in which I had been sent to him, he clung to me like a faithful servant or a dog…He came to me with the most astonishing requests, wanted to see spirits, learn the cabala, and would not believe me when I assured him that I was totally ignorant in all these matters….Yet it was strange that he would often come to me with his puzzling and stupid questions when I was faced with a puzzle my own to which his fanciful notions and requests frequently provided a catchword and the impetus for a solution…The occult books and writings he brought me and in which he sought his salvation taught me more than I realized at the time.”
“Sooner or later each of us must take the step that separates him from his father, from his mentors; each of us must have some cruelly lonely experience – even if most people cannot take much of this and soon crawl back.”
“People like you and me are quite lonely really but we still have each other, we have the secret satisfaction of being different, of rebelling, of desiring the unusual. But you must shed that, too, if you want to go all the way to the end. You cannot allow yourself to become a revolutionary, an example, a martyr. It is beyond imaging – ”
“On my table lay a few volumes of Nietzsche. I lived with him, sensed the loneliness of his soul, perceived the fate that had propelled him on inexolerably; I suffered with him, and rejoiced that there had been one man who had followed his destiny so relentlessly.”
“He spoke about the spirit of Europe and the signs of the times. Everywhere, he said, we could observe the reign of the herd instinct, nowhere freedom and love. All this false communion – from the fraternities to the choral societies and the nations themselves – was an inevitable development, was a community born of fear and dread, out of embarrassment, but inwardly rotten, outworn, close to collapsing.”
“Genuine communions…is a beautiful thing. But what we see flourishing everywhere is nothing of the kind…Men fly into each other’s arms because they are afraid of each other…And why are they afraid? You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society of men afraid of the unknown within them!
It’s hopeless. Dear Sinclair, nothing good can come of all this.
I can feel the approaching conflict…Of course it will not ‘improve’ the world…But it won’t have been entirely in vain. It will reveal the bankruptcy of present-day ideals, there will be a sweeping away of Stone Age gods. The world, as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish – and it will.”
“Humanity – which they loved as we did – was for them something complete that must be maintained and protected. For us, humanity was a distant goal toward which all men were moving, whose image no one knew, whose laws were nowhere written down.”
“What will come is beyond imagining. The soul of Europe is a beast that has lain fettered for an infinitely long time. And when it’s free, its first movements won’t be the gentlest….Then our day will come, then we will be needed. Not as leaders and lawgivers – we won’t be there to see the new laws – but rather as those who are willing, as men who are ready to go forth and stand prepared wherever fate may need them.”
“Nothing can be born without first dying. But it is far more terrible than I had thought.”
“It was not my lot to breathe fullness and comfort, I needed the spur of tormented haste.”
“How strange that the stream of the world was not to bypass us any more, that it now went straight through our hearts, and that now or very soon the moment would come when the world would need us, when it would seek to transform itself.”
“Dressing the wound hurt. Everything that has happened to me since has hurt. But sometimes…I find the key and climb deep into myself where the images of fate lie aslumber in the dark mirror…”
“I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?”
“Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again.”
“My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams – like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.”
Max Demian re-interpreting the story of Cain and Abel:
“Here was a man with something in his face that frightened the others. They didn’t dare lay hands on him; he impressed them, he and his childen. We can guess – no, we can be quite certain – that it was not a mark on his forehead like a postmark – life is hardly ever as clear and straightforward as that. It is much more likely that he struck people as faintly sinister, perhaps a little more intellect and boldness in his look than people were used to. This man was powerful: you would approach him only with awe. He had a ‘sign.’ You could explain this any way you wished. And people always want what is agreeable to them and puts them in the right. They were afraid of Cain’s children: they bore a ‘sign.’ So they did not interpret the sign for what it was – a mark of distinction – but as its opposite. They said, ‘Those fellows with the sign, they’re a strange lot’ – and indeed they were. People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest. It was a scandal that a breed of fearless and sinister people ran about freely, so they attached a nickname and a myth to these people to get even with them, to make up for the many times they had felt afraid.”
“The point is that this God of both Old and New Testaments is certainly an extraordinary figure but not what he purports to represents. He is all that is good, noble, fatherly, beautiful, elevated, sentimental – true! But the world consists of something else besides. And what is left over is ascribed to the devil, this entire slice of world, this entire half is suppressed and hushed up. In exactly the same way they praise God as the father of all life but simply refuse to say a word about our sexual life on which it’s all based, describing it whenever possible as sinful, the work of the devil. I have no objection to worshiping this God Jehovah, far from it. But I mean we ought to consider everything sacred, the entire world, not merely this artificially separated half! Thus alongside the divine service we should also have a service for the devil. I feel that would be right. Otherwise you must create for yourself a God that contains the devil too…”
Max Demian’s thoughts on the thieves crucified next to Christ:
“…this sentimental little treatise about the good thief. At first he was a thorough scoundrel, had committed all those awful things and God knows what else, and now he dissolves in tears and celebrates such a tearful feast of self-improvement and remorse! What’s the sense of repenting if you’re two steps from the grave? I ask you. Once again it’s nothing but a priest’s fairy tale, saccharine and dishonest, touched up by touched up with sentimentality and given a highly edifying background. If you had to pick a friend from between the two thieves or decide which of the two you had rather trust, you most certainly wouldn’t select that sniveling convert. No, the other fellow, he’s a man of character. He doesn’t give a hoot for ‘conversion,’ which to a man in his position can’t be anything but a pretty speech. He follows his destiny to its appointed end and does not turn coward and forswear the devil, who has aided and abetted him until then. He has character, and people with character tend to receive the short end of the stick in biblical stories. Perhaps he’s even a descendent of Cain…”
“Only the ideas that we actually live are of any value. You knew all along that your sanctioned world was only half the world and you tried to suppress the second half the same way the priests and teachers do. You won’t succeed. No one succeeds in this once he has begun to think.”
“It’s possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard. And vice versa. Actually it’s only a question of convenience. Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them; things are forbidden to them that every honorable man will do any day in the year and other things are allowed to them that are generally despised. Each person must stand on his own feet.”
“We talk too much…clever talk is absolutely worthless. All you do in the process is lose yourself. And to lose yourself is a sin. One has to be able to crawl completely inside oneself, like a tortoise.”
“I could not have cared less what became of me. In my odd and unattractive fashion, going to bars and bragging was my way of quarreling with the world – this was my way of protesting. I was ruining myself in the process but at times I understood the situation as follows: if the world had no use for people like me, if it did not have a better place and higher tasks for them, well, in that case, people like me would go to pot, and the loss would be the world’s.”
“Although I never addressed a single word to Beatrice, she exerted a profound influence on me at that time. She raised her image before me, gave me access to a holy shrine, she transformed me into a worshiper in a temple…
By consecrating myself to her I consecrated myself to the spirit and to the gods.”
“Not that the picture resembled me – I did not feel that it should – but it was what determined my life, it was my inner self, my fate or my daemon. That’s what my friend would look like if I were to find one ever again. That’s what the woman I would love would look like if ever I were to love one. That’s what my life and death would be like, this was the tone and rhythm of my fate.”
“The life of a hedonist is the best preparation for becoming a mystic.”
“It’s good to realize that within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than ourselves.”
“I could not have written Demian even if I had known his address. I decided, however – in the same state of dreamlike presentiment in which I did everything – to send him the painting of the sparrow hawk.”
“The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God’s name is Abraxas.”
“We may conceive of the name as that of a godhead whose symbolic task is the uniting of godly and devilish elements.”
“The dream, the most important and enduringly significant of my life, went something like this: I was returning to my father’s house…in the house itself was my mother coming toward me – but as I entered and wanted to embrace her, it was not she but a form I had never set eyes on before, tall and strong, resembling Max Demian…This form drew me to itself and enveloped me in a deep, tremulous embrace. I felt a mixture of ecstasy and horror – the embrace was at once an act of divine worship and a crime. Too many associations with my mother and friend commingled with this figure embracing me. Its embrace violated all sense of reverence, yet it was bliss.”
“I now lived within a fire of unsatisfied longing, of tense expectancy that often drove me completely wild.”
“However, I was well-armed against the outside world. I was no longer afraid of people; even my fellow students had come to know this and treated me with a secret respect that often brought a smile to my lips. If I wanted to I could see through most of them and startled them occasionally. Only I rarely or never tried. I was always preoccupied with myself.”
“All of this music said the same thing, all of it expressed what was in the musician’s soul: longing, a most intimate atonement with the world and a violent wrenching loose, a burning hearkening to one’s own dark soul, an intoxicating surrender and deep curiosity about the miraculous.”
“Completely unreserved music, the kind that makes you feel that a man is shaking heaven and hell. I believe I love that kind of music because it is amoral.”
“As a young boy I had been in the habit of gazing at bizarre natural phenomenon…the surrender to Nature’s irrational, strangely confused formations produces in us a feeling of inner harmony with the force responsible for these phenomena. We soon fall prey to the temptation of thinking of them as being our own moods, our own creations, and see the boundaries separating us from Nature begin to quiver and dissolve. We become acquainted with that state of mind in which we are unbable to decide whether the images on our retina are the result of impressions coming from without of from within. Nowhere as in this exercise can we discover so easily and simply to what extent we are creative, to what extent our soul partakes of the constant creation of the world.”
“I dreamed I was able to fly, but in such a way that I seemed catapulted into the air and lost all control. The feeling of flying exhilarated me, but exhilaration turned to fear when I saw myself driven higher and higher, becoming more and more powerless. At that instant I made the saving discovery that I could regulate the rise or fall of my flight by holding or releasing my breath.”
“Each man had only one genuine vocation – to find the way to himself. He might end up as a poet or a madman, as a prophet or a criminal – that was not his affair, ultimately it was of no concern.”
REGARDING PRIESTHOOD
“A priest does not want to convert, he merely wants to live among believers, among his own kind. He wants to be the instrument and expression for the feeling from which we create our gods.”
(I recently heard on Christian radio that, it is important to hear the word of God spoken by others, not to simply be the voice that speaks it to others.)
“My friend, our new religion, for which we have chosen the name Abraxas, is beautiful. It is the best we have. But it is still a fledgling. Its wings haven’t grown yet. A lonely religion isn’t right either. There has to be a community, there must be a cult and intoxication, feasts and mysteries…”
“Live those dreams, plays with them, build altars to them…Whether you and I and a few others will renew the world someday remains to be seen. But within ourselves we must renew it every day, otherwise we just aren’t serious.”
“Startled, I countered: ‘But you can’t do everything that comes to your mind! You can’t kill someone because you detest him.’
He moved closer to me.
‘Under certain circumstances, even that.’”
“If you happen to think of something truly mad or sinful again, if you want to kill someone or want to commit some enormity, Sinclair, think at that moment that it is Abraxas fantasizing within you!”
“Ever since the night in which I had been sent to him, he clung to me like a faithful servant or a dog…He came to me with the most astonishing requests, wanted to see spirits, learn the cabala, and would not believe me when I assured him that I was totally ignorant in all these matters….Yet it was strange that he would often come to me with his puzzling and stupid questions when I was faced with a puzzle my own to which his fanciful notions and requests frequently provided a catchword and the impetus for a solution…The occult books and writings he brought me and in which he sought his salvation taught me more than I realized at the time.”
“Sooner or later each of us must take the step that separates him from his father, from his mentors; each of us must have some cruelly lonely experience – even if most people cannot take much of this and soon crawl back.”
“People like you and me are quite lonely really but we still have each other, we have the secret satisfaction of being different, of rebelling, of desiring the unusual. But you must shed that, too, if you want to go all the way to the end. You cannot allow yourself to become a revolutionary, an example, a martyr. It is beyond imaging – ”
“On my table lay a few volumes of Nietzsche. I lived with him, sensed the loneliness of his soul, perceived the fate that had propelled him on inexolerably; I suffered with him, and rejoiced that there had been one man who had followed his destiny so relentlessly.”
“He spoke about the spirit of Europe and the signs of the times. Everywhere, he said, we could observe the reign of the herd instinct, nowhere freedom and love. All this false communion – from the fraternities to the choral societies and the nations themselves – was an inevitable development, was a community born of fear and dread, out of embarrassment, but inwardly rotten, outworn, close to collapsing.”
“Genuine communions…is a beautiful thing. But what we see flourishing everywhere is nothing of the kind…Men fly into each other’s arms because they are afraid of each other…And why are they afraid? You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society of men afraid of the unknown within them!
It’s hopeless. Dear Sinclair, nothing good can come of all this.
I can feel the approaching conflict…Of course it will not ‘improve’ the world…But it won’t have been entirely in vain. It will reveal the bankruptcy of present-day ideals, there will be a sweeping away of Stone Age gods. The world, as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish – and it will.”
“Humanity – which they loved as we did – was for them something complete that must be maintained and protected. For us, humanity was a distant goal toward which all men were moving, whose image no one knew, whose laws were nowhere written down.”
“What will come is beyond imagining. The soul of Europe is a beast that has lain fettered for an infinitely long time. And when it’s free, its first movements won’t be the gentlest….Then our day will come, then we will be needed. Not as leaders and lawgivers – we won’t be there to see the new laws – but rather as those who are willing, as men who are ready to go forth and stand prepared wherever fate may need them.”
“Nothing can be born without first dying. But it is far more terrible than I had thought.”
“It was not my lot to breathe fullness and comfort, I needed the spur of tormented haste.”
“How strange that the stream of the world was not to bypass us any more, that it now went straight through our hearts, and that now or very soon the moment would come when the world would need us, when it would seek to transform itself.”
“Dressing the wound hurt. Everything that has happened to me since has hurt. But sometimes…I find the key and climb deep into myself where the images of fate lie aslumber in the dark mirror…”
“I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?”