Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest

Title:	Steppenwolf
Author:	Hermann Hesse
Year Published:	1927
Rating:	⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Date Read:	Mar. 16-23, 2025
Genre:	Psychological, Philosophical, Theological
Tags:	Fiction, Classics
Edition:	Penguin Classics

Steppenwolf may have changed my life, leading me to explore a world I had never considered. This article begins with my review of the book, followed by a story of its impact on my life, the lessons I’ve learned, and a collection of my favorite quotes, grouped by theme.

My Review of Steppenwolf (Hesse novel)

The first thing I’d like to point out is the difficulty of reading Steppenwolf. Of the four Hesse novels I’ve read – Demian, Siddhartha, Narcissus and Goldmund – this was the hardest to get through. It is dense and contains complex prose. I’ve picked a random paragraph so you can see for yourself:

Now it is impossible to be possessed by God and to affirm the sinner, and vice versa, but it is not possible for either saint or sinner (nor for any other of the unconditioned) to affirm as well that lukewarm mean, the bourgeois. Humor alone, that magnificent discovery of those who are cut short in their calling to highest endeavour, those who falling short of tragedy are yet as rich in gifts as in affliction, humor alone (perhaps the most inborn and brilliant achievement of the human spirit) attains to the impossible and brings every aspect of human existence within the rays of its prism. (p. 67)

I was like, “What?” Even now, I have to read this multiple times to fully understand its meaning. I’m not complaining at all – just pointing out that Steppenwolf might not be the best introduction to Hesse compared to his other books.

The second thing I’d like to point out is its structural similarity to A Hero of Our Time. Both books contain a preface from a side character, followed by the main character’s journal. Both also contain an author’s note or preface, indicating how its characters represent the vices, diseases, and crises of its generation. The main difference is that, unlike A Hero of Our Time which does not offer a solution, Steppenwolf does.

The third thing is that this novel has no chapter divisions. It feels like a dream – one scene flowing fantastically to the next, without neat breaks.

Overall, I found the deep and repeated readings of this book insightful in answering the question of how to deal with loneliness and discontentment, the demons of our time. Despite being written in 1927, its insights remain relevant across eras.

Lex Fridman recommends reading Demian when you’re younger, and Steppenwolf when you’re older. However, no matter your age, you can find valuable insights from this book on the path to wholeness and contentment.

How this book opened up a new world for me

Now, let’s talk about how Steppenwolf might have changed my life. Like Haller, I tend to take life too seriously – and I’ve suffered the consequences. This realization led me to search online on ways to develop humor and find laughter in life.

One Reddit comment suggested enrolling in Improv classes. Immediately, I looked up available classes in my country. Thankfully, I found one! However, I was too late to join their current online class. That was disappointing, but I found an event that weekend, a showcase for the improv students. It served as their graduation and displayed their learning in the classes. Despite being unfamiliar with the venue and the city, I decided to buy a ticket and go.

I’ve learned that improv classes are divided into five levels – with Level 1 being the easiest and Level 5 the most advanced. Some students had enrolled with friends or colleagues, performing together as a group.

One of the rounds involved the audience suggesting a random word. The group would spell the word sequentially, and then create a sentence using it. The first word was scoliosis and the second was soliloquy.

The group named OTP improvising on scoliosis

The same group improvising on the word soliloquy

In another round, one performer spoke in a made up language about a random topic and object, while their partner tries to interpret it to English. The item here was inhaler (prompted from the audience) and the topic was love.

One of my favorite segments was a Level 2 exercise. The performers lined up, with two starting a scene based on an audience prompt. When a bell rang, they froze in place, and the next performer tapped one of them out, taking their place and improvising the next scene. This game required them to embody different roles based on the last frozen moment—mirroring one of Steppenwolf’s core messages: practicing and playing out your multiple selves.

The group named Panay Improv performing the Level 2 exercise

The event lasted for hours, and I laughed to the point of tears.

The principles of improv speaks out the core message of Steppenwolf: learning to laugh, not taking yourself too seriously, and embracing your multitude of selves in a way that works for you.

Without this novel, I would have never had the resolve to travel to another city and experience something so different. Steppenwolf opened a new world for me—a world I desperately needed for my personal growth and development.

Lessons from the novel

Here are the key lessons I’ve learned from Steppenwolf:

1. Loving others is impossible without first loving ourselves.

As for others and the world around him he never ceased in his heroic and earnest endeavor to love them, to be just to them, to do them no harm, for the love of his neighbor was as strongly forced upon him as the hatred of himself, and so his whole life was an example that love of one’s neighbor is not possible without love of oneself, and that self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.
p. 16

2. Every relationship teaches us something.

There was something I could give to each, something each could give to me. Wishes, dreams, and possibilities that had once had no other life than my own imagination were lived now in reality. They passed before me like beautiful flowers, Ida and Laura and all whom I had loved for a summer, a month, or a day.
p. 234

3. We are more than just two selves.

The breast and the body are indeed one, but the souls that dwell in it are not two, nor five, but countless in number. Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads.
p. 73

4. One part of us can control another—Be mindful of who’s in charge.

At any rate, the man, my diabolically distorted double, had his wolf marvelously broken. The wolf was obediently attentive to every command and responded like a dog to every call and every crack of the whip.
p. 226

And now the wolf commanded and the man obeyed. At the word of command the man sank on his knees, let his tongue loll out and tore his clothes off with his filed teeth.
p. 227

5. Learn to Laugh—It’s the Antidote to Isolation

Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.
p. 248

My Favorite Quotes

And finally, here are all my favorite quotes.

Multiplicity of the self

In this way he was always recognizing and affirming with one half of himself, in thought and act, what with the other half he fought against and denied.
p. 63. [[self-acceptance]], [[multiple souls]]

The breast and the body are indeed one, but the souls that dwell in it are not two, nor five, but countless in number. Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads.
p. 73. [[multiple souls]]

Imagine a garden with a hundred kinds of trees, a thousand kinds of flowers, a hundred kinds of fruit and vegetables. Suppose, then, that the gardener of this garden knew no other distinction than between edible and inedible, nine-tenths of this garden would be useless to him. He would pull up the most enchanting flowers and hew down the noblest trees and even regard them with a loathing an envious eye. This is what the Steppenwolf does with the thousand flowers of his soul. ==What does not stand classified as either man or wolf he does not see at all.== And consider all that he imputes to ‘man’! All that is cowardly and apish, stupid and mean – while to the wolf, only because he has not succeeded in making himself its master, is set down all that is strong and noble.
p. 79. [[multiple souls]]

I realized that it was the unendurable tension between inability to live and inability to die that made the unknown girl, the pretty dancer of the Black Eagle, so important to me. She was the one window, the one tiny crack of light in my black hole of dread. She was my release and my way to freedom. She had to teach me to live or teach me to die. She had to touch my deadened heart with her firm and pretty hand, and at the touch of life is would either leap again to flame or subside to ashes. … What I longed for in my despair was life and resolution, action and reaction, impulse and impetus.
p. 124. [[multiple souls]]

Every human being, it says, consists of ten, or a hundred, or a thousand souls.
p. 149. Haller to Hermine. [[multiple souls]]

These pictures – there were hundreds of them, with names and without – all came back. They rose fresh and new out of this night of love, and I knew again, what in my wretchedness I had forgotten, that they were my life’s possession and all its worth. Indestructible and abiding as the stars, these experiences, though forgotten, could never be erased.
…
There were moments when I felt with a glow that I had only to snatch up my scattered images and raise my life as Harry Haller and as the Steppenwolf to the unity of one picture, in order to enter myself into the world of imagination and be immortal. Was not this, then, the goal set for the progress of every human life?
p. 166-167. [[multiple souls]]

You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality. That is the prison where you lie.
p. 206. [[Solitude deprivation]], [[Self-love]], [[self-acceptance]], [[multiple souls]]

This mistaken and unhappy notion that a man is an enduring unity is known to you. It is also known to you that man consists of a multitude of souls, of numerous selves. The separation of the unity of the personality into these numerous pieces for madness. Science has invented the name Schizophrenia for it. Science is in this so far right as no multiplicity may be dealt with unless there be a series, a certain order and grouping. It is wrong in so far as it holds that only a single, binding and lifelong order is possible for the multiplicity of subordinate selves. This error of science has many unpleasant consequences, and the only advantage of simplifying the work of the state-appointed pastors and masters and saving them the labor of original thought. In consequence of this error many persons pass for normal, and indeed for highly valuable members of society, who are incurable mad; and many, on the other hand, are looked upon as mad who are geniuses. Hence it is that we supplement the imperfect psychology of science by the conception that we call the art of building up the soul. We demonstrate to anyone whose soul has fallen to pieces that he can rearrange theses pieces of a previous self in what order he pleases, and so attain to an endless multiplicity of moves in the game of life. As the playwright shapes a drama from a handful of characters, do so we from the pieces of the disintegrated self build up ever new groups, with ever new interplay and suspense, and new situations that are eternally inexhaustible. Look!
p. 223-224. [[multiple souls]]

This is the art of life. You may develop the game of your life and lend it animation. You may complicate and enrich it as you please. It lies in you hand. Just as madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizophrenia the beginning of all art and all fantasy.
p. 225. [[multiple souls]]

Taking life too seriously

‘You take the old Goethe much too seriously, my young friend. You should not take old people who are already dead seriously. It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, my young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don’t mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
p. 116 Goethe to Haller in a dream.

Everyone risks being laughed at when he addresses a girl. That’s always at stake. So take the risk, Harry, and if the owrst comes to the worst let yourself be laughed at.
p. 144. Hermine to Haller. [[not take yourself too seriously]]

You are here in a school of humor. You are to learn to laugh. Now, true humor begins when a man ceases to take himself seriously.
p. 207. [[not take yourself too seriously]]

Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.
p. 248. Mozart

Enjoyment and Suffering

A man should be proud of suffering. All suffering is a reminder of our high estate.
p.21

He said to me once when we were talking of the so-called horrors of the Middle Ages: ‘These horrors were really non-existent. A man of the Middle Ages would detest the whole mode of our present day life as something far more than horrible and cruel, far more than barbarous. Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and cruelties; it accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilization. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, between two modes of life, and thus loses the feeling for itself, for the self-evident, for all morals, for being safe and innorent. Naturally, everyone does not feel this equally strongly. A nature of such as Nietzsche’s had to suffer our present ills more than a generation in advance. What he had to go through alone and misunderstood, thousands suffer today.
p. 28. Haller’s neighbor. [[Loneliness]]

A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self.
p. 64

He is resolved to forget that the desperate clinging to the self and the desperate clinging to life are the surest way to eternal death, while the power to die, to strip one’s self naked, and the eternal surrender of the self bring immortality with them.
p. 76

He who sentimentally sings of blessed childhood is thinking of the return to nature and innocence and the origin of things, and has quite forgotten that these blessed children are beset with conflict and complexities and capable of all suffering.
p. 77.

But it’s a poor fellow who can’t take his pleasure without asking other people’s permission.
p. 132

On making music, Herr Haller, on making music as well and as much as possible and with all the intensity of which one is capable. That is the point, Monsieur. Though I carried the complete works of Bach and Haydn in my head and could say the cleverest things about them, not a soul would be better for it. But when I take hold of my mouth-piece and play a lively shimmy, whether the shimmy be good or bad, it will give people pleasure.
p. 156. Pablo

Whoever wants to live and enjoy his life today must not be like you and me. Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, find no home in this trivial world of ours -.
p. 177

Solitude

How foolish to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.
p. 46. Haller. [[Solitude]]

Was I really to live through all this again? All this torture, all this pressing need, all these glimpses into the paltriness and worthlessness of my own self, the frightful dread lest I succumb, and the fear of death. Wasn’t it better and simpler to prevent a repetition of so many sufferings and to quit the stage? … No, in all conscience, there was no power in the world that could prevail with me to go through the mortal terror of another encounter with myself, to face another reorganization , a new incarnation, when at the end of the road there was no peace or quiet – but forever destroying the self in order to renew the self.
p. 83-84. Haller. [[Suicide]], [[Solitude deprivation]], [[Solitude]]

We might as well look for the day when, with wires or without, with or without the disturbance of other sounds, we should hear King Solomon speaking, or Walter von der Vogelweide. And all this, I said, just as today was the case with the beginnings of radio, would be of no more service to man than as an escape from himself and his true aims, and a means of surrounding himself with an ever closer mesh of distractions and useless activities.
p. 123. [[Solitude deprivation]]

It is the world of your own soul that you seek. Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself.
p. 204. [[Solitude]]

Relationships

As for others and the world around him he never ceased in his heroic and earnest endeavor to love them, to be just to them, to do them no harm, for the love of his neighbor was as strongly forced upon him as the hatred of himself, and so his whole life was an example that love of one’s neighbor is not possible without love of oneself, and that self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.
p. 16. Haller’s neighbor

When a girl addresses you intimately and she isn’t disagreeable to you, then you should address her in the same way.
p. 109. Hermine. [[Feminine]], [[Interpersonal relationships]]

Doesn’t your learning reveal to you that the reason why I please you and mean so much to you is because I am a kind of looking-glass for you, because there’s something in me that answers you and understands you. Really, we ought all to be such looking-glasses to each other and answer and correspond to each other, but such owls as you are a bit peculiar.
p. 128