Men are always doomed to be duped, not so much by the arts of the sex, as by their own imaginations. They are always wooing goddesses, and marrying mere mortals.

Years ago I predicted that these suffragettes, tried out by victory, would turn out to be idiots. They are now hard at work proving it. Half of them devote themselves to advocating reforms, chiefly of a sexual character, so utterly preposterous that even male politicians and newspaper editors laugh at them; the other half succumb absurdly to the blandishments of the old-time male politicians, and so enroll themselves in the great political parties. A woman who joins one of these parties simply becomes an imitation man, which is to say, a donkey.

We are really so prejudiced by our educations, that, as the ancients deified their heroes, we deify their madmen.

Les hommes ne vivraient pas longtemps en société s’ils n’étaient les dupes les uns des autres.

It is the wicked deception of love that it begins by making us dwell not upon a woman in the outside world but upon a doll inside our head, the only woman who is always available in fact, the only one we shall ever possess, whom the arbitrary nature of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the real Balbec had been from the Balbec I imagined- a dummy creation that little by little, to our own detriment, we shall force the real woman to resemble.

For Jan was still suffering from the romantic illusion–the cause of so much misery and so much poetry–that every man has only one real love in his life.

"87. — Men would not live long in society were they not the dupes of each other.

[A maxim, adds Aimé Martin, "Which may enter into the code of a vulgar rogue, but one is astonished to find it in a moral treatise." Yet we have scriptural authority for it: "Deceiving and being deceived." — 2 TIM. iii. 13.]"

everyone is living in their own self-created illusion,

There are only two types of women: goddesses and doormats.

Why will mankind be fools, and be deceived? And why are friends’ and lovers’ oaths believed; When each, who searches strictly his own mind, May so much fraud and power of baseness find?

Those without an idea of who you are make you become what they think.

Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.-

It happens to all of us, time and time again. Because we’ve been deluded into thinking we’re really one person.

Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool.