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

That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.

By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

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

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.

It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.