"An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space."
"Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature."
"He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex."
"...those works that don't touch the heart, it seems to me, miss the true aim of Art."
"What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright...Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?"
"She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage."
"Before marriage she thought hserself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books."
"Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling."
"Financial demands, of all the rough winds that blow upon our love, (are) quite the coldest and the most biting."
"And she felt as though she had been there, on that bench, for an eternity. For an infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space."
"Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes."
"One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us."
"He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish."
"Indeed, for the last three years, he had carefully avoided her, as a result of the natural cowardice so characteristic of the stronger sex..."
"Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed her—the opportunity, the courage."
"At last she sighed."But the most wretched thing — is it not? — is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice."
"Self-confidence depends on environment: one does not speak in the same tone in the drawing room than in the kitchen."
"Yet she resigned herself: reverently she put away in the chest of drawers her beautiful dress and even her satin shoes, whose soles had been yellowed by the slippery wax of the dance floor. Her heart was like them: contact with wealth had laid something over it that would not be wiped away."
"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."
"One thinks of nothing,’ he continued; ‘the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blinding with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes."
"I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which prove to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in turpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them."
"But vilifying those we love always detaches us from them a little. We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands."
"Speech is a rolling-mill that always thins out the sentiment."
"Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?"
"Charles went to kiss her shoulder.-Leave me alone! she said, you're creasing my dress."