"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."

"Enchanted woods are rare. But I suspect that where they exist, and seem — so deep is their magic — to march nowhere on reality, they are most often within a stone's-throw of the dear homes of every day ; nor is it needful to travel very far afield in order to find them."

"The spectacle was born from the world's loss of unity, and the immense expansion of the modern spectacle reveals the enormity of this loss."

"Give us spare time, Holy Jerome, and joyful energy to use it."

"I should prefer to be miserable, ill, and feared, and live in some out of the way corner, than to be "settled” and given my place in modern mediocrity!"

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

"One can scarcely imagine the unspeakable change that was wrought in man’s emotional life when he took farewell from that almost wholly antique world."

"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."

"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."

"If we look deeply into the essence of things, into the horror of existence, Nietzsche thinks we will be overwhelmed — paralyzed. Like Hamlet we will not be able to act, because we see that action can "not change anything in the eternal nature of things."

"Pour éviter la stigmatisation omniprésente entourant l’autisme, les personnes autistes s’efforcent souvent de paraître neurotypiques en utilisant le camouflage pour dissimuler leurs comportements et traits naturels."

"Quand c'est le monde qui vient à nous et non l'inverse, nous ne sommes plus « au monde », nous nous comportons comme les habitants d'un pays de cocagne qui consomment leur monde."

"An artist is by temperament a person who sees things as they are in themselves, not in those rough convenient categories which serve for the business of life."

"The figure of Christ, to us an entirely symbolical figure, is the interpretation of that old Osiris myth of Egypt."

"But one thing I will tell you: the exploration of the unconscious has in fact and in truth discovered the age-old, timeless way of initiation."

"The human characteristic is consciousness; the characteristic of consciousness is a process of perpetual exhaustion, of detachment without rest or exclusion from everything that comes before it."

"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."

"The opus magnum had two aims: the rescue of the human soul and the salvation of the cosmos."