Gustave Flaubert

"Every moment is a portrait of the eternal."

"Lack of gratitude is the root of all evil."

"I prefer silence even of reproach to this imbecility of praise."

"Never touch your idols: the gilding will come off in your hands."

"There is in every human heart some not wholly appeased desire."

"We rarely know what we see, but we always see what we know."

"One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore."

"The heart is an instrument that plays false."

"I must drink a thousand cups of coffee before I write a single page."

"Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be saved or preserved."

"Kindness is something that civilization has not entirely erased."

"Man wants to know if it is possible for him to change; I have always thought a man capable of anything."

"In the end, everyone is weird, and most people are alone."

"Charm is something that cannot be taught or explained."

"To reach success, the good earth has sometimes need of the spade."

"Nothing great has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance."

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness."

"Memory is a labyrinth from which we are always trying to escape."

"One should, as a rule, respect public opinion in so far as is necessary."

"History never repeats itself. Man always does."

"The existence of evil is constant proof of the freedom of man."

"To be stupid alone is bad enough. Together, stupidity becomes a kind of religion."

"One must always have something beautiful to look at, or else one will lose the capacity for love."

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."

"The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes."

"One mustn't criticize other people on grounds of their badness, at least to their faces."

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

"The heart always timely utters its great protests against the evil in the world."

"A person is, in the end, the sum of what he has read."

"Friendship is not something that should be sought after, but rather stumbled upon."