Status Updates From The Letters of Gustave Flau...

"The slogan 'The Republic is above all argument' is on par with the dogma that 'The pope is infalliable' Always formulas! Always gods!... What are we to believe in then? Nothing! Such is the beginning of Wisdom. It is time to rid ourselves of Principles and to espouse Science. The only rational thing is a government of Mandarins... The people never come of age." - Flaubert, 1871

"... what a sublime word to classify that vegetable species Merdoide!"- George Sand to Flaubert Merdoide: word coined by George Sand to mean "of the shit family." These letters are not making me want to hang out with Flaubert, but I want to be BFFs with George Sand.

On Les Miserables: "I find neither truth nor greatness in this book. As for style, it strikes me as deliberately incorrect and low. It's a way of flattering the populace. Hugo is taking pains to be nice to everybody... Where are the prostitutes like Fantine, convicts like Valjean? Not once do you see them suffer, in the depths of their souls. They are puppets, figures made of sugar..."

"In order not to live, I plunge into art, like a man in despair; I make myself drunk with ink as others do with wine."

"The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that "black hole" was infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony.. With the gods gone and Christ not yet come, there was a unique moment, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, where man stood alone"

wonderful collection of letters