The future is the worst thing about the present.

The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft.

Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.

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

The morality of art is in its very beauty.

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

There are in me, in literary terms, two distinct characters: one who is taken with roaring, with lyricism, with soaring aloft, with all the sonorities of phrase and summits of thought; and the other who digs and scratches for truth all he can, who is as interested in the little facts as the big ones, who would like to make you feel materially the things he reproduces.