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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| dd665c6 | For two nights Felicite never left the dead girl. She said the same prayers over and over again, sprinkled holy water on the sheets, then sat down again to watch. At the end of her first vigil, she noticed that the child's face had gone yellow, the lips were turning blue, the nose looked sharper, and the eyes were sunken. She kissed them several times, and would not have been particularly surprised if Virginie had opened them again: to mind.. | love superstition | Gustave Flaubert | |
| 5578a63 | It is so sweet, amid all the disenchantments of life, to be able to dwell in thought upon noble characters, pure affections, and pictures of happiness. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| b490560 | Had they nothing else to say to one another? Yet their eyes were full of more serious speech, and while they forced themselves to find trivial phrases, they felt the same languor stealing over them both. It was the whisper of the soul, deep, continuous, dominating that of their voices. Surprised with wonder at this strange sweetness, they did not think of speaking of the sensation or of seeking its cause. Coming joys, like tropical shores, .. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| fdb6006 | He racked his brains for a way of making his declaration. Torn all the while between fear of offending and shame at his own faint-heartedness, he wept tears of dejection and desire. Then he made forceful resolutions. He wrote letters, and tore them up; he gave himself a time limit, then extended it. Often he started out with a determination to dare all; but his decisiveness quickly deserted him in Emma's presence [...] Emma, for her part, n.. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 132b52e | The stars shone through the leafless jasmine branches. Behind them they heard the river flowing, and now and again on the bank the rustling of the dry reeds. Masses of shadow here and there loomed out in the darkness, and sometimes, vibrating with one movement, they rose up and swayed like immense black waves pressing forward to engulf them. The cold of the nights made them clasp closer; the sighs of their lips seemed to them deeper; their .. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 7ecbd0d | One day, you find it,' repeated Rodolphe, 'one day, quite suddenly, when you've given up hope. Then new horizons stretch before you, and it's like a voice that cries: "Here it is!" You long to tell this person everything that's ever happened to you, to give everything, to sacrifice everything to this person! There's no need for words - you can read each other's thoughts. You've seen each other in your dreams.' (He was staring at her.) 'So, .. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 5e772e9 | England and Brittany were places one came back from. But America, the colonies, and the Antilles were lost in some unknown region on the other side of the world. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 7e21ab8 | She put him near the front door and a number of visitors were surprised that he would not answer to the name 'Polly', which is what all parrots were supposed to be called. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 1a5b276 | Such killings were part of the natural order of things, an inevitable consequence of belonging to a royal household. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 37a8025 | Spiritul acesta, pozitiv in mijlocul exaltarilor sale, care iubise biserica pentru florile ei, muzica pentru cuvintele romantelor, literatura pentru atatarile ei pasionale, se razvratea in fata misterelor credintei, dupa cum se indarjea si mai aprig impotriva disciplinei de nesuportat pentru firea ei. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 42962c9 | Dans leurs regards indifferents flottait la quietude de passions journellement assouvies ; et, a travers leurs manieres douces, percait cette brutalite particuliere que communique la domination de choses a demi faciles, dans lesquelles la force s'exerce et ou la vanite s'amuse, le maniement des chevaux de race et la societe des femmes perdues. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 72d5b31 | She constantly complained of her nerves, her chest, her liver. The noise of footsteps made her ill; when people left her, solitude became odious to her; if they came back, it was doubtless to see her die. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 09156b0 | And on the endless dusty ribbon of the highway, on sunken roads vaulted over by branches, on paths between stands of grain that rose to his knees, the sun on his shoulders and the morning air in his nostrils, his heart full of the night's bliss, his spirit at peace and his flesh content, he would ride on his way ruminating his happiness, like someone who keeps savoring, hours later, the fragrance of the truffles he has eaten for dinner. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 861a6b2 | No hay que tocar a los idolos: su dorado se nos queda en las manos | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 689936a | One thinks of nothing," he continued; "the hours slip by. 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." | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| a247841 | Some details escaped her, but the regret remained with her. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| e5b1d31 | Before marriage she thought herself 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. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 6d383f4 | Because wanton or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he only half believed in the sincerity of those he was hearing now; to a large extent they should be disregarded, he believed, because such exaggerated language must surely mask commonplace feelings: as if the soul in its fullness did not sometimes overflow into the most barren metaphors, since no one can ever tell the precise measures of his own needs, of his own ideas, of hi.. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 79207c1 | What exasperated her was that Charles seemed to have no notion of her torment. His conviction that he was making her happy struck her as impudent imbecility, his uxorious complacency as ingratitude. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 8f77646 | Madame was in her room upstairs. She wore an open dressing gown that showed between the shawl facings of her bodice a pleated chamisette with three gold buttons. Her belt was a corded girdle with great tassels, and her small garnet coloured slippers had a large knot of ribbon that fell over her instep. She had bought herself a blotting book, writing case, pen-holder, and envelopes, although she had no one to write to; she dusted her what-no.. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| a8160d3 | Sometimes, too, she told him of what she had read, such as a passage in a novel, of a new play, or an anecdote of the "upper ten" that she had seen in a feuilleton; for, after all, Charles was something, an ever-open ear, and ever-ready approbation. She confided many a thing to her greyhound. She would have done so to the logs in the fireplace or to the pendulum of the clock." | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 4623179 | When she was taken too bad she went off quite alone to the sea-shore, so that the customs officer, going his rounds, often found her lying flat on her face, crying on the shingle. Then, after her marriage, it went off, they say." "But with me," replied Emma, "it was after marriage that it began." | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 7fd8c9b | she watched her son's happiness in sad silence, as a ruined man looks through the windows at people dining in his old house. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| b03b25c | What's improper about it?" retorted the clerk. "Everybody does it in Paris!" It was an irresistible and conclusive argument." | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| a9a19a3 | In spite of her vapourish airs (as the housewives of Yonville called them), Emma, all the same, never seemed gay, and usually she had at the corners of her mouth that immobile contraction that puckers the faces of old maids, and those of men whose ambition has failed. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 98f1a40 | This is indeed a funny country. Yesterday, for example, we were in a cafe which is one of the best in Cairo, and there were, at the same time as ourselves, inside, a donkey shitting, and a gentleman who was pissing in a corner. No one finds that odd; no one says anything. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| d359775 | Leon at once envied the calm of the tomb, and one evening he had even made his will, asking to be buried in that beautiful rug with velvet stripes he had received from her. For this was how they would have wished to be, each setting up an ideal to which they were now adapting their past life. Besides, speech is a rolling-mill that always thins out the sentiment. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 04db9ae | and now, their great love, in which she dwelt immersed, seemed to dwindle beneath her, like the waters that vanish into the bed of the river, and she could see the mud. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 27519d2 | Art, like the Jewish God, wallows in sacrifices. So tear yourself to pieces, mortify your flesh, roll in ashes, smear yourself with filth and spittle, wrench out your heart! You will be alone, your feet will bleed, an infernal disgust will be with you throughout your pilgrimage, what gives joy to others will give none to you, what to them are but pinpricks will cut you to the quick, and you will be lost in the hurricane with only beauty's f.. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 086231a | Et Emma cherchait a savoir ce que l'on entendait au juste dans la vie par les mots de felicite, de passion et d'ivresse, qui lui avaient paru si beaux dans les livres. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 28ace7c | Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it; everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips only the unattainable desire for a greater delight. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| b7e9318 | On the grave among the pine trees, a boy knelt weeping, his chest, racked by sobs, heaving in the darkness, oppressed by an immense grief gentler than the moon and more unfathomable than the night. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| feda970 | One ought to know everything, to write. All of us scribblers are monstrously ignorant. If only we weren't lacking in stamina, what a rich field of ideas and similes we could tap! Books that have been the source of entire literatures, like Homer and Rabelais, contain the sum of all the knowledge of their times. They knew everything, those fellows, and we know nothing. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| c5eb0b3 | The doctrine of the mean (the epithet 'golden' is un-Aristotelian) regularly occurs in later writers as a piece of moral advice -- a recipe or rule reminding us to 'observe the mean', to be moderate in all things and to avoid excess and deciciency. (If the doctrine urges us not to drink too much wine, it equally urges us not to drink too little -- but that is something which the moralizers usually find it prudent to ignore.) | Jonathan Barnes | ||
| c0d235d | What I do most days matters more than what I do once in a while." That kind of self-encouragement is a greater safeguard than self-blame." | Gretchen Rubin | ||
| 78ff6b9 | Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. --Journal of Thomas Merton | Gretchen Rubin | ||
| f1286d6 | W. H. Auden articulated this tension beautifully: "Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity." | Gretchen Rubin | ||
| 1143090 | By mindfully deciding how to act in line with my values instead of mindlessly applying my rules, I was better able to make the decisions that supported my happiness. | intentionality rules values | Gretchen Rubin | |
| 62d6ab3 | We are happy when we are growing. | Gretchen Rubin | ||
| d3e5f23 | A sense of growth is so important to happiness that it's often preferable to be progressing to the summit rather than to be at the summit. Neither a scientist nor a philosopher but a novelist, Lisa Grunwald, came up with the most brilliant summation of this happiness principle: "Best is good, better is best." | Gretchen Rubin | ||
| feb9d51 | Happiness doesn't always make you feel happy." Activities that contribute to long-term happiness don't always make me feel good in the short term; in fact they're sometimes downright unpleasant." | Gretchen Rubin | ||
| e9e2b24 | I don't want to reject my life. I want to change my life without changing my life. | life | Gretchen Rubin | |
| 2e5cf98 | once the habit is in place, we can effortlessly do the things we want to do. | Gretchen Rubin | ||
| 9df8c2e | I started thinking more about music. I thought I'd accepted the fact that, as part of "Being Gretchen," I didn't really like music, but in fact, the truth was slightly different: I thought I didn't like music, but in fact, I didn't approve of my own taste--I wished I liked sophisticated music, like jazz or classical or esoteric rock. Instead, my taste ran mostly to what might play on a lite FM station. Oh, well. Be Gretchen." | preferences taste | Gretchen Rubin |