You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.

The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.

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

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 the infinite and the ideal?

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.

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.

You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything