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"Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature."
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"Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? Youtake delight in vexing me. You have no compassion for my poor nerves.""You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. Theyare my old friends. I have heard you mention them with considerationthese last twenty years at least."

"Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?I didn't think it polite to listen, sir."
Explore more quotes by Gustave Flaubert

"Doesn't it seem to you," asked Madame Bovary, "that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?"

"I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something " the eternal 'what's the use?' " sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis."

"He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze; he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height."

"A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous."

"Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion."

"This haze of blood must subside, the palace must collapse under the weight of the riches it conceals, the orgy must finish and the time come to awaken."

"He seriously thought that there is less harm in killing a man than producing a child: in the first case you are relieving someone of life, not his whole life but a half or a quarter or a hundredth part of that existence that is going to finish, that would finish without you; but as for the second, he would say, are you not responsible to him for all the tears he will shed, from the cradle to the grave? Without you he would never have been born, and why is he born? For your amusement, not for his, that's for sure; to carry your name, the name of a fool, I'll be bound " you may as well write that name on some wall; why do you need a man to bear the burden of three or four letters?"

"Contact with the world, with which I have been steadily rubbing shoulders now for fourteen months, makes me feel more and more like returning to my shell. I hate the crowd, the herd. It seems to me always atrociously stupid or vile."
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