Gustave Flaubert

I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.

She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.

Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?

There was an air of indifference about them, a calm produced by the gratification of every passion; and through their manners were suave, one could sense beneath them that special brutality which comes from the habit of breaking down half-hearted resistances that keep one fit and tickle one’s vanity—the handling of blooded horses, the pursuit of loose women.

She did not believe that things could remain the same in different places, and since the portion of her life that lay behind her had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be better.

Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.

She remembered the heroines of novels she had read, and the lyrical legion of those adulterous women began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her. Now she saw herself as one of those amoureuses whom she had so envied: she was becoming, in reality, one of that gallery of fictional figures; the long dream of her youth was coming true.

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

Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom

I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.

The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.

You don’t make art out of good intentions.

What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.

It is an excellent habit to look at things as so many symbols.

On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.

And he beholds the moon; like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.

It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.

Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.

One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.

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

He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.