As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while natureโs greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.
Gustave FlaubertEverything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.
Gustave FlaubertOn certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
Gustave FlaubertAs humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.
Gustave Flaubert