“I happen to think we’ve set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.”

“The ideal has many names and beauty is but one of them.”

“Now listen. If I think he’s awful we’ll just talk about the weather and the crops for a few minutes and then we’ll have an ominous pause and stare at him. That always makes a man feel a perfect fool and the moment a man feels a fool he gets up and goes.”

“...he felt a queer little pang of bitterness because reality seemed so different from the ideal”

“Sometimes I think that when we say our honour prevents us from doing this or that we deceive ourselves, and our real motive is vanity.”

“He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveller through life comes to an acceptance of reality. It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life. The strange thing is that each one who has gone through that bitter disillusionment adds to it in his turn, unconsciously, by the power within him which is stronger than himself.”

“When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself?”