You had an image of life inside you, a belief or an ideal, that you were ready to do good deeds, to suffer, and to sacrifice – and by degrees you noticed that the world had no need of your good deeds, or sacrifices, and such like; that life was not an heroic tale, with roles for heroes, and such like, but a comfortable bourgeois parlour, where one is perfectly satisfied with eating and drinking, coffee and knitted stockings, tarot readings and music on the radio. And he who wants otherwise and has the heroic and the beautiful inside him, the veneration of great poets or the adoration of saints inside him, he is a fool and a knight errant, a latter day Don Quixote?
Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
life, life-philosophy, truth, wisdom