Gustave Flaubert

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 __hat__ the use?_ _ sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.

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 a place where you would not have expected to find it.

To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too has been done. Remains the present day. But the ground is shaky: so where can you set the foundations? An answer to this question must be found if one is to produce anything vital and hence lasting. All this disturbs me so much that I no longer like to be spoken to about it.

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 bottom, she has been so ultra-screwed by filthy pricks!

It__ hard to communicate anything exactly and that__ why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.

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

Alas! It seems to me that when one is as good as this at dissecting children who are to born, one can__ stiffen up enough to create them.

Sometimes I don__ understand why my arms don__ drop from my body with fatigue, why my brain doesn__ melt away. I am leading an austere life, stripped of all external pleasure, and am sustained only by a kind of permanent frenzy, which sometimes makes me weep tears of impotence but never abates. I love my work with a love that is frantic and perverted, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt that scratches his belly. Sometimes, when I am empty, when words don__ come, when I find I haven__ written a single sentence after scribbling whole pages, I collapse on my couch and lie there dazed, bogged down in a swamp of despair, hating myself and blaming myself for this demented pride that makes me pant after a chimera. A quarter of an hour later, everything has changed; my heart is pounding with joy.

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

In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. __ don__ want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don__ see what use he is.

I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker__ head if they__e not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it__ bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God__ face when it__ bitter

One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.

God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world

Everyone rushes wherever his instincts impel him, the populace swarms like insects over a corpse, poets pass by without having the time to sculpt their thoughts, hardly have they scribbled their ideas down on sheets of paper than the sheets are blown away; everything glitters and everything resounds in this masquerade, beneath its ephemeral royalties and its cardboard scepters, gold flows, wine cascades, cold debauchery lifts her skirts and jigs around_horror! horror! and then there hangs over it all a veil that each one grabs part of to hide himself the best he can. Derision! Horror _ horror!

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 it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.

And she felt as though she had been there, on that bench, for an eternity. For an infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.

Contact with the world, with which I have been steadily rubbing shoulders now for fourteen months, makes me feel more and more like returning to my shell. I hate the crowd, the herd. It seems to me always atrociously stupid or vile.

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 off several branches at one go. And while nature__ greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.