Demian by Hermann Hesse is not for the orthodox. It nudges you into questioning your beliefs, principles, and basically anything that is part of this world. Nothing, according to Demian, is beyond questioning.

What do you do when you cannot connect with societal rules? You think differently than the people around you, and you like different things, leading to a sort of identity crisis. After a while, such people often give in and join the herd, unable to withstand the pressure of non-conformity. They end up living a dual life, one intricately manufactured for the world and one genuine, which may not see the light of day.

There are clear-cut protocols to follow if validation and respect from society mean a lot to you. If you deviate from those rules, you are considered flawed. In reality, humans are not perfect. All of us have a trace of evil in us. Some show it openly, others try to rein it in. The book tells you to make peace with your imperfections, deemed “evil” by society, for all these traits, no matter how good or bad they are, are your own. When our “good” and “evil” happily coexist without outward interference, you get to live a life that is most true to yourself. Demian, in essence, is about embracing your authenticity and being in harmony with your divine and not-so-divine.

Demian is not for everyone. It is for the questioners, the people who are not satisfied with the status quo. They want more, they seek more. Sometimes, the deeper thoughts in the book take a while to trickle in. The main character, Sinclair, often sounds eccentric and unclear. But that’s the whole point. You, the reader, need to acknowledge his uniqueness and accept him for who he is – a rule breaker.

The book’s main purpose is to lead readers into a new world of creation: “Hesse’s vision is reaching out to another generation searching for meaning in an age of anxiety and war.”

Here are some of my favorite thought-provoking quotes from Demian:

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born must destroy a world. The bird flies to god. The god is called Abraxas.

Abraxas is soon clarified for Sinclair in a lecture by a teacher as “something like a deity whose symbolic task is to unite the divine and the un-divine.”

All I wanted to do was try to live the life that was inside me, trying to get out. Why was that so hard?

When writers write novels, they tend to act as though they were God, who can see and understand anything and everything about a person’s story, and they present that story as though God himself were telling it, without all the veils of disguise that are the fundamental nature of life. I cannot do that— any more than these writers can. But my story is more important to me than some writer’s story is to him, because it is my own, and it is the story of a human being— not an imagined, possible, ideal, or in some other way nonexistent person but a real, unique, living, breathing one.

We can understand each other, but each of us can truly grasp and interpret only himself.

When I imagined the devil, I could see him perfectly well on the street down the hill, in disguise or not, or at the fair, or in a pub — but never with us at home.

Such cracks and tears heal, they grow back together and are forgotten, but down in our most secret recesses, they continue to live and bleed.

For the first time I tasted death, and death tastes bitter because it is birth: anxiety and terror in the face of frightening renewal.

There is nothing in the world more hateful to a person than walking the path that leads to himself!

This whole God, in the Old Testament and the New Testament both, is a marvelous character, true, but he’s not what he’s supposed to be. He is good and noble, the Father, the high and beautiful, the sentimental— all true! But the world consists of other things too. And all those other things get chalked up to the devil; that whole part of the world, that whole half, is just suppressed and hushed up. The same way God is praised for being the Father of all life, while everything sexual, everything life in fact depends on, is simply hushed up or described wherever possible as the devil’s work, and sinful! I have nothing against honoring and worshipping this God Jehovah, not in the least. But I think we should honor everything, and worship everything— the whole world is sacred, not just this artificially partitioned official half! We need not only church service but a devil’s service. That’s what I think. Or else we need to create a God who includes the devil too, and whose eyes we don’t need to cover when the most natural things in the world take place in front of him.

‘Forbidden’ is not an eternal truth — it can change.

It is entirely possible to never do anything forbidden and still be an absolute scoundrel.

I think I like music because it has so little to do with morality. Everything else is moral or immoral, and I am looking for something that isn’t.

“You’ve told me you like music because it is outside of morality,” he said. “Well and good. But now stop being a moralist yourself! You can’t keep comparing yourself to other people— if nature has made you a bat, you can’t decide you want to be an ostrich. You sometimes feel like you don’t belong, you blame yourself for following a different path than most other people. You have to unlearn that. Stare into the fire, look at the clouds, and when ideas or intuitions come to you and the voices in your soul start to speak, trust them and don’t worry about whether your teacher or your daddy or any other lord above likes what they have to say! That’s what ruins a person. That’s how you end up on the law-abiding sidewalk, just another fossil.

When we hate someone, what we hate is something in him, or in our image of him, that is part of ourselves. Nothing that isn’t in us ever bothers us.

There is no reality other than what we have inside us. That is why most people live such unreal lives, because they see external images as reality and never give their own internal world a chance to express itself. You can be happy living like that, but once you know that there is another way, you can no longer choose to follow the path of the many. The path of the many is an easy one, Sinclair.

I just live in my dreams, that’s what you noticed. Other people live in dreams too, but they’re not their own dreams, that’s the difference.

We felt that we embodied nature’s will for the new, the individual, and the future, while the others’ lives showed only a will to persist in the old. They loved humanity as much as we did, but for them it was something already finished, to be preserved and protected, while for us it lay in a distant future we were all moving toward, whose image was still unknown, and whose laws had never been written.

He had loved and had found himself in the process. Most people love only in order to lose themselves.