What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.

It's a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.

Doesn't it seem to you," asked Madame Bovary, "that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?

The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.