The correspondence of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert, if approached merely as a chapter in the biographies of these heroes of nineteenth century letters, is sufficiently rewarding.
Sorrow makes us very good or very bad.
Gossiping is the plague of little towns.
Life is a slate where all our sins are written; from time to time we rub the sponge of repentance over it so we can begin sinning again.
The masses are still ungrateful or ignorant. They prefer murder, poisonings, and crimes generally to a literature possessed of style and feeling.
Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age.
Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self when one does not lack wit and is familiar with all the niceties of language. Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays herself in fine apparel, hides her head and effaces herself; an advocate who has an answer for everything, who has always foreseen everything, and who assumes a thousand forms in order to be right. The most honorable of men is he who thinks best and acts best, but the most powerful is he who is best able to talk and write.
Autumn is a melancholy and graceful andante, that prepares beautifully solemn adagio of winter.
I’m not sure that there’s anything more horrible than staying in a furnished room in Paris, especially.
You must write for all those who are thirsty to read and who can enjoy a good reading.
The constant winds of petty appetite dissipate the power of response.
Honestly, I do not believe in a drunk Byron writing beautiful verses. Inspiration can pass through the soul just as easily in the midst of an orgy as in the silence of the woods, but when it is a question of giving form to your thoughts, whether you are secluded in your study or performing on the planks of a stage, you must be in total possession of yourself.
At the very time I should speak out I feel more than ever the impossibility of doing so.
When a marriage for love is on the carpet; you must expect to waste time. But when it’s a marriage of convenience between two people who have no whims and who know what they want; it’s soon arranged.
Between genius and madness there is often not the thickness of a hair.
If you do not cease loving me, you will see me, you will feel me, you will hear me everywhere. My form will be before your eyes because it will remain engraved on your mind; my voice will echo in your ear because it will remain in your heart’s memory: my spirit will again reveal itself to your spirit because your soul understands me and knows me completely.
There are moments of exaltation and ecstasy when our thoughts become, in a way, more pure, more subtle, more ethereal. These rare moments raise us up so high, carry us so far out of ourselves, that when we fall back to earth we lose the consciousness and the memory of that intellectual intoxication. Who can understand the anchorite’s mysterious visions? Who can relate the dreams of the poet before his emotion has cooled so that he can write them down for us?
But it’s different with a woman. Her work in the house is to keep not to get.
For her, finally, the literary art is an instrument of social salvation – it is her means of touching the world with her ideals, her love, her aspiration; for him the literary art is the avenue of escape from the meaningless chaos of existence – it is his subtly critical condemnation of the world.
A hundred times in life,” she declares, “the good that one does seems to serve no immediate purpose; yet it maintains in one way and another the tradition of well wishing and well doing, without which all would perish.