rapture” – words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.

Sadness is a vice.

For two nights Félicité never left the dead girl. She said the same prayers over and over again, sprinkled holy water on the sheets, then sat down again to watch. At the end of her...

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the...

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

The future is the worst thing about the present.

I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests,...

But that which fanaticism formerly promised to the elect, science now accomplishes for all men.

Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.

And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.

What an elder sees sitting; the young can’t see standing.

Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. . . I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.

I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.

Having no intercourse with anyone, she lived in the torpid state of a sleep-walker.

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following...

The world is going to become bloody stupid and from now on will be a very boring place. We’re lucky to be living now.

Deep down, all the while, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she kept casting desperate glances over the solitary waster of her life, seeking some white sail in the...

I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all

But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands.

One mustn’t ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more

She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.

He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations...

Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.

Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.

Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that’s the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.

The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.

He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides

The smooth folds of her dress concealed a tumultuous heart, and her modest lips told nothing of her torment. She was in love.

Financial demands, of all the rough winds that blow upon our love, (are) quite the coldest and the most biting.

One thinks of nothing,’ he continued; ‘the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blinding with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures....

Equality is slavery. That is why I love art.

The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft

I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.

You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything

It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque, choosing a profession and practicing it, grabbing one’s share of the common cake,...

What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright…Haven’t you ever happened to come across in a...

He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex.

Irony takes nothing away from pathos.

In the dark room a cloud of yellow dust flew from beneath the tool like a scatter of sparks from under the hooves of a galloping horse. The twin wheels turned and hummed. Binet was...

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

One mustn’t look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.

Doesn’t it seem to you,” asked Madame Bovary, “that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of...

Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.

I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought...

I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.