"When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me."

"Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens."

"Of course it was cause and effect, but in the necessity with which follows the other lay all tragedy of life."

"There was an immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead: they did not seem to belong to the same species; and it was strange to think that but a little while before they had spoken and moved and eaten and laughed."

"Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner."

"I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody's else advice."

"It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late."

"You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent."

"There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood...Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five."

"People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise."

"Men seek but one thing in life — their pleasure."

"I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world."

"Art... is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life."

"Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind."

"It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded."

"You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action."

"He had doubts about the utility of examination on subjects which had been crammed for the occasion. He wanted common sense."

"Observing these people I am no longer surprised that there is such a scarcity of domestic servants back home."

"I hate people who play bridge as though they were at a funeral and knew their feet were getting wet."

"A soul is a troublesome possession, and when man developed it he lost the Garden of Eden."

"My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror."

"Money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets."

"To eat well in England, you should have a breakfast three times a day."

"Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it."

"What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature."

"What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories."

"Money is like a sixth sense - and you can't make use of the other five without it."

"It is unsafe to take your reader for more of a fool than he is."

"The trouble with our younger authors is that they are all in the sixties."

"Now the world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger."

"He knew that women appreciated neither irony nor sarcasm, but simple jokes and funny stories. He was amply provided with both."

"The isn't only a sunny place for shady people."

"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too."

"She gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she put into her answer. "You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!""

"The tragedy of love is indifference."

"Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure."

"The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him. (18 March 1857)"

"[L'Éducation sentimentale displays Flaubert's] nervous analysis of the smallest facts, a notation of life that is both meticulous and alive."

"The novel's outside world, if well enough created, does live on, when you look at the world of Jane Austen, Flaubert, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Proust! They're indelible."

"The archaeological question, as far as the reconstruction attempted in Salammbô is concerned, has long been resolved. The work has no archaeological value whatsoever, and Flaubert is here a hundred cubits below Anacharsis himself. His rather considerable research was not useless to him, far from it, for he was guided by a sense of the picturesque and knew how to pinpoint everything that would allow him to create beautiful images, but the incomplete list of his errors has been sufficiently compiled so that we should not be misled by Frœhner's otherwise very lively letter. The same cannot be said of the very remarkable historical sense he demonstrates. The idea he gives of Carthage is accurate. He has precisely grasped the causes of its greatness and its weakness. He has expressed them in a historical style of perfect solidity, clarity, and authority. This style has as its body the intelligent, condensed and almost epigrammatic force of Voltaire and Montesquieu, and as its soul a disciplined oratorical breath à la Chateaubriand."

"La question archéologique, en ce qui concerne la restitution tentée dans Salammbô, est résolue depuis longtemps. La valeur archéologique de l'ouvrage est nulle, et Flaubert se trouve ici à cent coudées au-dessous dAnacharsis lui-même. Son travail de recherches, assez considérable, ne lui a pas été inutile, loin de là, car il y était guidé par le sens du pittoresque, et savait tomber au juste sur tout ce qui devait lui permettre de belles images, mais la liste incomplète de ses erreurs a été suffisamment dressée pour que nous ne nous en laissions pas imposer par la lettre, d'ailleurs très verveuse, à Frœhner. Il n'en est pas de même du sens historique très remarquable dont il fait preuve. L'idée qu'il donne de Carthage est juste. Il a saisi avec exactitude les causes de sa grandeur et de sa faiblesse. Il les a exprimées dans un style historique d'une solidité, d'une netteté, d'une autorité parfaites. Ce style a pour corps la force intelligente, condensée et comme épigrammatique de Voltaire et de Montesquieu, et pour âme un souffle oratoire discipliné à la Chateaubriand."

"Thus Flaubert has two quite different conceptions of himself. One is at the level of banal description, for example when he writes to his mistress Louise: ‘What am I? Am I intelligent or am I stupid? Am I sensitive or am I stolid? Am I mean or am I generous? Am I selfish or am I selfless? I have no idea, I suppose I am like everyone else, I waver between all these. . . .’ In other words, at this level he is completely lost. Why? Because none of these notions has any meaning in themselves. They only acquire a meaning from inter-subjectivity, in other words what I have called in the Critique the ‘objective spirit’ within which each member of a group or society refers to himself and appears to others, establishing relations of interiority between persons which derive from the same information or the same context. Yet one cannot say that Flaubert did not have, at the very height of his activity, a comprehension of the most obscure origins of his own history. He once wrote a remarkable sentence: ‘You are doubtless like myself, you all have the same terrifying and tedious depths’—les mêmes profondeurs terribles et ennuyeuses. What could be a better formula for the whole world of psychoanalysis, in which one makes terrifying discoveries, yet which always tediously come to the same thing? His awareness of these depths was not an intellectual one. He later wrote that he often had fulgurating intuitions, akin to a dazzling bolt of lightning in which one simultaneously sees nothing and sees everything. Each time they went out, he tried to retrace the paths revealed to him by this blinding light, stumbling and falling in the subsequent darkness."

"I want to think that every character is a little-I guess like Flaubert saying "Emma Bovary, c'est moi"-that I am the characters but the characters aren't me"

"Madame Bovary is written entirely according to the system of tanka. Flaubert wrote it so slowly and painstakingly, because he had to begin it anew after every fifth word."

"When I was working on China Men, I remember reading a critic who was praising the great male writers, like Flaubert and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Henry James, who were able to write great women characters. I don't remember if they said women had done men in this way or not, but I remember thinking that to finish myself as a great artist I'd have to be able to create men characters. Along with that, I was thinking that I had to do more than the first person pronoun."

"I see now, looking at this little book, November, by Flaubert, so many of the themes that he was going to explore so wonderfully later are just touched upon, he didn’t have the skill to carry them any further. And then, as his life went by, he followed them, he followed these dark tunnels."

"As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use."

"L'homme n'est rien, l'oeuvre – tout"