Never had Madame Bovary been as beautiful as now. She had that indefinable beauty that comes from happiness, enthusiasm, success -- a beauty that is nothing more of less than a harmony of temperament and circumstances. Her desires, her sorrows, her experience of sensuality, her ever-green illusions, had developed her step by step, like a flower nourished by manure and by the rain, by the wind and the sun; and she was finally blooming in the fullness of her nature.

He had had such things said to him so many times that none of them had any freshness for him. Emma was like all his other mistresses; and as the charm of novel…

Nothing specific stood out against the vast background of the future that she thus evoked: the days were all of them splendid, and as alike as the waves of the…

He saw no reason why there should be all this to-do about so simple a thing as love-making.

It may be we shall know in the hereafter Why we, begetting hopes, give birth to fears, And why the world's too beautiful for laughter, Too gross for tears.

Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud - We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, All melodies the echoes of that voi…

The rosy mountain peaks laughed like high lustrous thoughts, and Helen, speechless, raised her pale hands toward the sun and joyed to feel its warm rays fallin…