"Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world."
"There was an air of indifference about them, a calm produced by the gratification of every passion; and through their manners were suave, one could sense beneath them that special brutality which comes from the habit of breaking down half-hearted resistances that keep one fit and tickle one’s vanity—the handling of blooded horses, the pursuit of loose women."
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Source: Gustave Flaubert (1993). “Madame Bovary: Patterns of Provincial Life”, Everyman's Library
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