Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.

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

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.

Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.

Madame Bovary is myself.

I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.

Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.

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