If love
has deceived you, do you think that it would have been better for
you all your life to regard love as something it is not, and never
can be? Would such an illusion not warp your most significant
actions; would it not for many days hide from you some part of the
truth that you seek? Or if you imagine that greatness lay in your
grasp, and disillusion has taken you back to your place in the
second rank; have you the right, for the rest of your life, to curse
the envoy of truth? For, after all, was it not truth your illusion
was seeking, assuming it to have been sincere? We should try to
regard disillusions as mysterious, faithful friends, as councillors
none can corrupt, And should there be one more cruel than the rest,
that for an instant prostrates you, do not murmur to yourself
through your tears that life is less beautiful than you had dreamed
it to be, but rather that in your dream there must have been
something lacking, since real life has failed to approve. And indeed
the much-vaunted strength of the strenuous soul is built up of
disillusions only, that this soul has cheerfully welcomed. Every
deception and love disappointed, every hope that has crumbled to
dust, is possessed of a strength of its own that it adds to the
strength of your truth; and the more disillusions there are that
fall to the earth at your feet, the more surely and nobly will great
reality shine on you--even as the rays of the sun are beheld the
more clearly in winter, as they pierce through the leafless branches
of the trees of the forest.
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