Gustave Flaubert

Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn__ come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words __liss,_ __assion,_ and __apture_ - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity _ I think that__ what being really human means.

The future is the worst thing about the present.

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.

Doubt _ is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.

Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.

But that which fanaticism formerly promised to the elect, science now accomplishes for all men.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

There is no truth. There is only perception.

The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.

I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whatever he may be. I care little who has placed us here below to fulfil our duties as citizens and fathers of families; but I don't need to go to church to kiss silver plates, and fatten, out of my pocket, a lot of good-for-nothings who live better than we do. For one can know him as well in a wood, in a field, or even contemplating the eternal vault like the ancients. My God! mine is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, and of Beranger! I am for the profession of faith of the 'Savoyard Vicar,' and the immortal principles of '89! And I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which proves to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in turpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.