"Illusion is the first of all pleasures...." - Quote by Voltaire

“I envy animals for two things - their ignorance of evil to come, and their ignorance of what is said about them.”

“Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.”

“Very learned women are to be found, in the same manner as female warriors; but they are seldom or ever inventors.”

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

“You have been professing yourself reluctant to throw off your load of illusion because truth was uncertain. Well, it is certain now, yet the burden still weighs you down, while other people are given wings on freer shoulders, people who have not worn themselves out with research, nor spent a decade and more reflecting on these questions.”

“Financiers live in a world of illusion. They count on something which they call the capital of the country, which has no existence.”

“The memory of past troubles is pleasant.[Lat., Jucunda memoria est praeteritorum malorum.]”

“But it's precisely in this cold, loathsome half-despair, half-belief, in this deliberate burying of yourself underground for forty years out of sheer pain, in this assiduously constructed, and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness, in all this poision of unfulfilled desires turned inward, this fever of vacillations, of resolutions adopted for eternity, and of repentances a moment later that you find the very essence of that strange, sharp pleasure.”

“Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.”