But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.

You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.

Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.

Il s’était tant de fois entendu dire ces choses, qu’elles n’avaient pour lui rien d’original. Emma ressemblait à toutes les maîtresses ; et le charme de la nouveauté, peu à peu tombant comme un vêtement,...

Adieu, mon cher vieux. Relis et rebûche ton conte. Laisse-le reposer et reprends-le, les livres ne se font pas comme les enfants, mais comme les pyramides, avec un dessin prémédité, et en apportant des grands...

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed at

Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the...

If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All...

Beneath beautiful appearances I search out ugly depths, and beneath ignoble surfaces I probe for the hidden mines of devotion and virtue. It’s a relatively benign mania, which enables you to see something new in...

I can’t admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry,...

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.

Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.

Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides,...

She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic,...

Alas! It seems to me that when one is as good as this at dissecting children who are to born, one can’t stiffen up enough to create them.

Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its elect, science now accomplishes for all men.

I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average state is one of being annoyed

Poetry is as exact a science as geometry

The artist must be in his work like God in his Creation, invisible and all-powerful, so that he is felt everywhere but not seen.

And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather are metaphors.

As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms that break...

What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!

Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if...

Ils en conclurent que la syntaxe est une fantaisie et la grammaire une illusion.

He seriously thought that there is less harm in killing a man than producing a child: in the first case you are relieving someone of life, not his whole life but a half or a...

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier

Exuberance is better than taste.

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.

An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.

Charles went to kiss her shoulder.-Leave me alone! she said, you’re creasing my dress.

Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

Exuberance is better than taste

Madame Bovary is myself.

Quanto a Emma, non si chiedeva se lo amasse. Ella credeva che l’amore dovesse arrivare all’improvviso, con fragori e folgori; uragano dei cieli che cade sulla vita, la sconvolge, strappa via le volontà come foglie,...

Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.

From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine,...

I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something – the eternal ‘what’s the use?’ – sets its...

When will someone write from the point of view of a joke, that is to say theway God sees events from above?

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

By dint of railing at idiots you run the risk of becoming idiotic yourself

The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

With a little more time, patience, and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspects of arts, he would have managed to write mediocre poetry, good enough for a...