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 promise of future accomplishments.
Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
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.
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.
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.
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.
One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.
I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.
Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.
The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.
Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.
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 seeing things.
The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.
A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
I took Eugene Sue's Arthur from the reading-room. It's indescribable, enough to make you vomit. You have to read this to realize the pitifulness of money, success, and the public. Literature has become consumptive. It spits and slobbers, covers its blisters with salve and sticking-plaster, and has grown bald from too much hair-slicking. It would take Christ of art to cure this leper.
Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.
Madame Bovary is myself.
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