As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.

Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.

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

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?

There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries; one crosses them like bridges and keeps going.

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.