On spinach: I dislike it, and am happy to dislike it because if I liked it I would eat it, and I cannot stand it.

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

Madame Bovary is myself.

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.

The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion; emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!

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