"It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find."
- Gustave Flaubert
"Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live."
"Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work."
"There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it"
"One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels."
"We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means."
"But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted."
"God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world"
"I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker’s head if they’re not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it’s bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existe..."
"In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means..."