“I sat in the old-fashioned and comfortable restaurant at a small table that I had quite unnecessarily reserved by telephone, and studied the menu. In a tumbler were two orchids I had bought for my new acquaintance.”
Steppenwolf
Herman Hesse, from "Steppenwolf"
“…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 neighbour was as strongly forced upon him as the hatred of himself, and so his whole life was an example that love of one’s neighbour 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.”