One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.

What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the innerforce of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air--a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible.

Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.

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.

She did not believe that things could remain the same in different places, and since the portion of her life that lay behind her had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be better.

What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.

On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.