"You do not really love me — you love nobody. Is that not true?" "Maybe," said Siddhartha wearily. "I am like you. You cannot love either, otherwise how could you practice love as an art? Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can — that is their secret."

But your questions, which are unanswerable without exception, all spring from the same erroneous thinking.

When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my rusty lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the most devilish pain burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. - Harry Haller

Every important cultural gesture comes down to a morality, a model for human behavior concentrated into a gesture.

My real self wanders elsewhere, far away, wanders on and on invisibly and has nothing to do with my life.

I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.

All interpretation, all psychology, all attempts to make things comprehensible, require the medium of theories, mythologies, and lies.