Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.
How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.
There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries; one crosses them like bridges and keeps going.
Emma was no asleep, she was pretending to be asleep; and, while he was dozing off at her side, she lay awake, dreaming other dreams.
After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again.
And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.
A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
To be simple is no small matter.
I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to live in the bellies of whales, gives up the ghost with a groan and then comes back to life three days later!
God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world.
L’Ide e seule est e ternelle et ne cessaire. The idea alone is eternal and necessary.
Everyone became brave from excess of terror.
Axiome: la haine du bourgeois est le commencement de la vertu. Axiom: Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.
For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.
Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.
As words have an effective power of their own, curses reported against someone might turn against the speaker.
We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.
The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror.
By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.
By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.