"What has been missed shall be found ; what has been lost shall be gained"

"Notons déjà que Flaubert tenait de ses ancêtres champenois et normands un tempérament plus solide et plus réfléchi que léger."

"Fuyant le deuil présent de l'heure triste et brève,/Evade-toi, Poète, aux siècles de l'oubli"

"The story of Emma Bovary would hardly attract, if published in the daily news columns, much attention nowadays."

"We do not seek to enlighten our time, or to improve it, or to instruct it, but by revealing to it our own suffering and our own dreams we try to open to it again and again the world of images, the world of the soul, the world of experience."

"Recently I had to sort out my books again, because circumstances forced me to give away part of my library."

"For my part, I am trying to wake up, — to wring slumber out of my pores."

"Je viens d’écarter le rideau : sur le balcon, le soleil a étendu ses moelleux coussins."

"I am thinking less than before of a doctor. Psychoanalysis is too basic a help for me, it helps once and for all, it clears out, and to find myself cleared out one day would perhaps be even more hopeless than this disorder."

"Mon esprit, peut-être trop grossier, se cabrait déjà contre le charabia où le poète se perdait de plus en plus."

"This is a play of repentance, power, revenge and fate that can also be seen as fantasy, dream, imagination, metaphor or magic."

"Of the truths which come (if any do) with middle age, is the gradual recognition that in one’s friendly intercourse the essential the—one thing needful—is not what people say, but what they think and feel."

"To be sure, Flaubert experienced from childhood on an unquestionable fondness for privacy and solitude. A well-heated room, books and leisure seemed to the young Gustave the most desirable conditions for happiness."

"Nous sommes partis d’Ajaccio pour Vico le 7 octobre, à 6 heures du matin. Le fils de M. Jourdan nous a accompagnés jusqu’à une lieue hors de la ville."

"Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point."

"Je suis avant tout homme de loisir et de caprice, il me faut mes heures, j’ai des calmes plats et des tempêtes."

Entre le Verbe et le Silence, la poésie de la fin du XIXᵉ siècle pressent que parler est déjà trahir.

"Midway through his life, Dante, on the eve of Good Friday, 1300, discovers that he has strayed from the True Way of the religious life, and has wandered into the Dark Wood of Error, where he must spend a miserable night."

"Dieu ne répond pas à tout le monde – la mer non plus."

"Étrangement et singulièrement j’ai aimé tout ce qui se résumait en ce mot : chute."

Le tri des souvenirs obéit-il à une loi, ou se fait-il au hasard ?

"Oui, elle avait cessé de vivre de la vie terrestre pour s'absorber dans le mensonge de cette vie idéale et n'être plus qu'un pur Esprit mêlé aux illusions d'un monde imaginaire."

"With departing Venus, large to the last, and shining even to the edge of the horizon, the vast dome presents at this moment, such a spectacle !"

"It is, I imagine, common in youth to feel in quick succession a number of different attitudes towards life and the world, and to feel each in turn as strongly as if it had no competitors."