Gustave Flaubert Quotes

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

To be simple is no small matter.

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft.

The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.

Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it.

Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.

(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.

You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!

… Her heart remained empty once more, and the procession of days all alike began again. So they were going to follow one another, like this, in line, always identical, innumerable, bringing nothing!

Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.

Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.

One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.

For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act.

If you knew all the dreams I've dreamed!

I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.

I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.

But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands.

You don’t make art out of good intentions.

One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.

She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.

Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.

I have dreamed much and have done very little.

Everyone became brave from excess of terror.

Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.

DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)

The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.

Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.

She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.

Tout ce qu'on invente est vrai, soi-en sure. La poesie est une chose aussi precise que la geometrie.

They took each other's advice, opened one book, went over to another, then did not know what to decide when opinions diverged so widely.

I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.

The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion; emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.

On spinach: I dislike it, and am happy to dislike it because if I liked it I would eat it, and I cannot stand it.

What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!

It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.

He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides

The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.

Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.

The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror

My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else's - monotonous, sensible, stupid.

Put all your rage and madness into your work and live as orderly a life as possible.