Gustave Flaubert Literature Quotations

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.

And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather aremetaphors.

The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.

The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.

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

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.

Madame Bovary is myself.

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

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.