Gustave Flaubert Quotes

Some details escaped her, but the regret remained with her.

Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidit...

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondere...

Read in order to live.

Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest c...

I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker’s head if they’re not sweet, winos to chuck t...

God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world

The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.

Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly; ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of ...

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

By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream

The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature.

And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and ...

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. ...

How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anyt...

Idols must never be touched: the gilt will come off on our hands.

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

What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.

Travel, leave everything, copy the birds. The home is one of civilization’s sadnesses.

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

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, ...

Read in oreder to live

People believe a little too easily that the function of the sun is to help the cabbages along.

There is no truth. There is only perception.

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

If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too mu...

You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your un...

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instructio...

An overwhelming curiosity makes me ask myself what their lives might be like. I want to know what th...

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

Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.

But that which fanaticism formerly promised to the elect, science now accomplishes for all men.

Leon was weary of loving without any result; moreover he was beginning to feel that depression cause...

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

When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse ...

I believe in Supreme Being, a Creator, whoever he may be, it's of no importance to me, who put us he...

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

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

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of stupidity attained by the b...

Have you really not noticed, then, that here of all places, in this private, personal solitude that ...

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

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

In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creati...

Beneath beautiful appearances I search out ugly depths, and beneath ignoble surfaces I probe for the...

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

Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in you...

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

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days ...

You don’t make art out of good intentions.

Sadness is a vice.

Then he remembered his wedding, the old times, the first pregnancy of his wife; he, too, had been ve...

Our ignorance of history makes us libel to our own times. People have always been like this.

I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room

Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself...

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

Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I a...

I'm no more modern than ancient, no more French than Chinese, and the idea of a native country, that...

Sometimes I don’t understand why my arms don’t drop from my body with fatigue, why my brain doesn’t ...

I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and dem...

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

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

He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze; he loved the ...

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

Never have things of the spirit counted for so little. Never has hatred for everything great been so...

I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empt...

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

From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are danci...

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

As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-ba...

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

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

When will someone write from the point of view of a joke, that is to say theway God sees events from...

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

It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your...

Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.

I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’...

...and the country is like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe o...

The future is the worst thing about the present.

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it

Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s wh...

Having no intercourse with anyone, she lived in the torpid state of a sleep-walker.

On days when it was too hot, they did not leave their room. The dazzling brilliance from outside pla...

In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ...

How wonderful to find in living creatures the same substance as those which make up minerals. Nevert...

Then they wondered if there were men in the stars. Why not? And as creation is harmonious, the inhab...

On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its cl...

The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do n...

Sometimes, in a daze, they completely dismantled the cadaver, then found themselves hard put to it t...

Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.

How badly arranged the world is. What is the purpose of ugliness, suffering, sadness? Why our powerl...