Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.

We often feel that we lack something, and seem to see that very quality in someone else, promptly attributing all our own qualities to him too, and a kind of ideal contentment as well. And so the happy mortal is a model of complete perfection--which we have ourselves created.

Every great idea exerts, on first appearing, a tyrannical influence: Hence, the advantages it brings are turned all too soon into disadvantages.

I think that I am better than the people who are trying to reform me.

If you treat men the way they are you never improve them. If you treat them the way you want them to be, you do.

No one feels himself easy in a garden which does not look like the open country.

To know where a thing is we must have found it.