Gustave Flaubert

 A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.

One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.

You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.

he only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.