The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise i… - Gustave Flaubert

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

Don't talk to me about your hideous reality! What does it mean — reality? Some see things black, others blue — the multitude sees them brute-fashion. There is nothing less natural than Michael Angelo; there is nothing more powerful! The anxiety about eternal truth is a mark of contemporary baseness; and art will become, if things go on in that way, a sort of poor joke as much below religion as it is below poetry, and as much below politics as it is below business. You will never reach its end — yes, its end! — which is to cause within us an impersonal exaltation, with petty works, in spite of all your finished execution.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity. (4 or 5 October 1871)