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.

This haze of blood must subside, the palace must collapse under the weight of the riches it conceals, the orgy must finish and the time come to awaken.

Success is a result, not a goal

A friend who dies, it’s something of you who dies.

There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of...

I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room

At other times, at the edge of a wood, especially at dusk, the trees themselves would assume strange shapes: sometimes they were arms rising heavenwards, , or else the trunk would twist and turn like...

So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and clean her out from top to...

What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

Indeed, for the last three years, he had carefully avoided her, as a result of the natural cowardice so characteristic of the stronger sex…

Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.”(Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains.)

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

. . . human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

Non leggete, come fanno i bambini, per divertirvi, o, come fanno gli ambiziosi per istruirvi. No, leggete per vivere.

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it

In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older, he lost his taste for them, but the excellent authors just...

People believe a little too easily that the function of the sun is to help the cabbages along.

It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless

A memory is a beautiful thing, it’s almost a desire that you miss.

To be stupid and selfish and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.

God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeoisie.

Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody’s wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.

Haven’t you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you’ve had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?

She (Madame Bovary) had that indefinable beauty that comes from happiness, enthusiasm, success – a beauty that is nothing more or less than a harmony of temperament and circumstances

The artist ought no more to appear in his work than God in nature.

I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.

Pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard, had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing grew there, and that which passed through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like them, leave...