Gustave Flaubert Quotations

Read in order to live.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

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

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

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

The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens.

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

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

A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.

One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

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

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

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 in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

What an elder sees sitting; the young can't see standing.

There is no truth. There is only perception.

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

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.

A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.

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.

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

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.

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

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

One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.

What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.

The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.

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

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.

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

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.

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

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

The future is the worst thing about the present.

I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.

There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.

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.

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

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

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

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

Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.

A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.

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

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

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.

It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.

One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.

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.

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

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

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

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

She (Madame Bovary) had that indefinable beauty that comes from happiness, enthusiasm, success - a beauty that is nothing more or less than a harmony of temperament and circumstances

Poetry is as exact a science as geometry

I maintain that ideas are events. It is more difficult to make them interesting, I know, but if you fail the style is at fault.

Happy are they who don't doubt themselves and whose pens fly across the page. I myself hesitate, I falter, I become angry and fearful, my drive diminishes as my taste improves, and I brood more over an ill-suited word than I rejoice over a well-proportioned paragraph.

. . . human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.

Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when what we want is to move the stars to pity

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.

The artist ought no more to appear in his work than God in nature.

The artist must be in his work like God in his Creation, invisible and all-powerful, so that he is felt everywhere but not seen.

Books are made not like children but like pyramids and they're just as useless! And they stay in the desert! Jackals piss at their foot and the bourgeois climb up on them.

Equality is slavery. That is why I love art.

Print: to see one's name in print! - Some people commit a crime for no other reason

You must not think that feeling is everything. . . . Art is nothing without form.

By dint of railing at idiots you run the risk of becoming idiotic yourself

By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming idiotic oneself

Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.

You can't find the soul with a scalpel.

Art is nothing without form.

I know nothing more noble than the contemplation of the world.

I do not like to "interest" the public with myself.

Once one has kissed a cadaver's forehead, there always remains something of it on the lips, an infinite bitterness, an aftertasteof nothingness that nothing can erase.

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.

Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.

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.

I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to live in the bellies of whales, gives up the ghost with a groan and then comes back to life three days later!

Books aren't made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids. There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands there in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!

Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you.

Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.

Adultery ... could be as banal as marriage.

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

Talent is a long patience.

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