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"For it cannot be denied that all over the world and in all ages there are beings who are perceived to be extraordinary, charming, and appealing, and whom many honor as benevolent spirits, because they make one think of a more beautiful, a freer, a more winged life than the one we lead."
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Exlpore more Idealism quotes
"None could be the most perfect. If indeed any, it is only perfect."
"Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold... brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds."
"The notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous."
"I prefer truth-based entertaining idealism."
"I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice."
"Sadly enough, individual liberty remains the ideal of revolutionary thinkers even in the 21st Century."
"Idealism is like a castle in the air if it is not based on a solid foundation of social and political realism."
"The select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest."
Explore more quotes by Hermann Hesse
"And while he compared all these things which he was seeing with his eyes to the mental pictures he had painted of them in his homesickness, it became clear to him that he was, after all, destined to be a poet, and he saw that in poets' dreams reside a beauty and enchantment that one seeks in vain in the things of the real world."
"The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect, or on a slow path towards perfection: no, it is perfect in every moment, all sin already carries the divine forgiveness in itself."
"Here in this endless and gleaming wildernessI was removed farther than ever from the world of men --And I never saw so close and so clearlyThe image in the mirror of my own soul."
"Once a man takes honesty as his ideal, he cannot confine himself to showing the pleasant and reasonable side of his nature."
"I had considered myself some kind of genius and had considerably underestimated the toils and difficulties encountered along the path to an art."
"To be able to throw one's self away for the sake of a moment, to be able to sacrifice years for a woman's smile - that is happiness."
"What I am in search of is not so much the gratification of a curiosity or a passion for worldly life, but something far less conditional. I do not wish to go out into the world with an insurance policy in my pocket guaranteeing my return in the event of a disappointment, like some cautious traveller who would be content with a brief glimpse of the world. On the contrary, I desire that there should be hazards, difficulties and dangers to face; I am hungry for reality, for tasks and deeds, and also for privation and suffering."
"I understand you well. Now we have no need to dispute: you are awake, and so you have seen the difference between us, the difference between men akin to their father and those who take their destiny from a woman; the difference between spirit and intellect."
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