Disillusionment and Lost Love

Je l’ai trop aimé pour ne le point haïr!

[ On being told at a party that people were ducking for apples :] There, but for a typographical error, is the story of my life.

The tragedy of love is indifference.

What I want is to draw inspiration only from the truth. . . . My qualifications for this important role include a large head, an enormous nose, disappointment in love, and expectations of ill health.

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what world calls a romance.

The heart was made to be broken.

When a love comes to an end, weaklings cry, efficient ones instantly find another love, and the wise already have one in reserve.

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

After a few years of marriage a man can look right at a woman without seeing her and a woman can see right through a man without looking at him.

A woman's flattery may inflate a man's head a little; but her criticism goes straight to his heart, and contracts it so that it can never again hold quite as much love for her.

There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. In the end such a man becomes impossible to get hold of, since he is wholly exterior, without kernel, a tattered, painted bag of clothes, a decked-out ghost that cannot inspire even fear and certainly not pity.

A promise to love someone forever, then, means, 'As long as I love you I will render unto you the actions of love; if I no longer love you, you will continue to receive the same actions from me, if for other motives.' Thus the illusion remains in the minds of one's fellow men that the love is unchanged and still the same.

What knows he of love who has not been obliged to despise just what he loved

Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

Expectation improperly indulged in must end in disappointment.

Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, meet the expectation.

In the dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to withdraw their funds at the same time.

A divorce is like an amputation; you survive, but there’s less of you.

There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship—only backward. You try to start again but get into blaming over and over. Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless. Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpses.

Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against all the disappointments of life. I have never known any trouble that an hour’s reading would not dissipate.

it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

I hated her now with a hatred more fatal than indifference because it was the other side of love.

Love . . . dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source, it dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illnesses and wounds, it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings, but never a natural death. Every lover should be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love.