Demian ​(angol) 2 csillagozás

When an animal or person focuses all his attention and all his willpower on a given objective, he achieves it. That's all there is to it. And it's just the same with what you asked about. Look at a person carefully long enough, and you'll know more about him than he himself does.

I didn't care what would become of me. In my peculiar and unlovely way, I was at war with the world when I sat in taverns and bragged; it was my form of protest. By doing so I was ruining myself, and at times my prospects were more or less as follows: if the world couldn't use people like me, if it had no better place or higher goals for them, then people like me just went to rack and ruin. Let the world suffer the consequences.

I was trying again with the most ardent efforts to construct a „bright world” for myself from the ruins of a period in my life that had collapsed; […].

I wished I could pray that God might perform a miracle and allow me to make a similar find. But I had forfeited the right to pray.

How much I wished at that time that he would fly into a temper; defend himself and storm about me. But he did nothing of the kind. I had to do all that for him inside myself. He would have forced a smile if he could have managed it. The fact that he found it impossible was the surest proof of the extent of the injury I had done him.

It was all like a compulsion. I did what I had to, because otherwise I simply had no idea what to do with myself. I was afraid of being alone for long periods; I stood in fear of the numerous tender, shy, warm impulses toward which I constantly felt responsive; I stood in fear of the tender thoughts of love that came to me so frequently.

An enlightened man had but one duty: to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led.

You can't compare youtself with others: if Nature has made you a bat you shouldn't try to be an ostrich.