Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.
Gustave Flaubert Quotes
A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.
By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming idiotic oneself.
Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.
A child of my own! Oh, no, no, no! Let my flesh perish with me, and let me not transmit to anyone the boredom and ignominiousness of life.
Sincere books may sometimes have a certain salutary pungency. Personally I deplore… those sugary confections which readers swallow without realizing that they are quietly poisoning themselves. It had always been my belief that the novelist, like the traveller, enjoyed the liberty to describe what he saw. Following the example of many others, I could have […]
Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you… I believe that the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.
She (Madame Bovary) had that indefinable beauty that comes from happiness, enthusiasm, success – a beauty that is nothing more or less than a harmony of temperament and circumstances.
If you seek happiness and beauty simultaneously you will attain neither one or the other, for the price of beauty is self-denial. Art, like the Jewish God, wallows in sacrifices.
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
