Gustave Flaubert

"From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There’ll be quite a lot of shouting. (1850)."

"She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes."

"Some details escaped her, but the regret remained with her."

"The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel."

"When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women."

"Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this."

"Sadness is a vice."

"I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings."