Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments.

DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)

Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.

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

It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.

Melancholy is a sensual pleasure that is deliberately provoked. How many people shut themselves away to make themselves sadder, or to weep beside a stream, or choose a sentimental book! We are constantly building and unbuilding ourselves.

Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it.