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

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












Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.
More Gustave Flaubert quotes
"Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly; ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling than to conjure away the burden and bitter...
"The public wants work which flatters its illusions.
"If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstr...
"Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.
"You don’t make art out of good intentions.
"I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction dra...
"As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will ther...
"The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.
"This sense of my own weakness and emptiness comforts me. I feel myself a mere speck of dust lost in space, yet I am part of that endless grandeur whic...
"...those works that don't touch the heart, it seems to me, miss the true aim of Art.
"If there is on earth, and among all these things of nothing, a belief worthy of adoration, if there is anything holy, pure and sublime, anything answe...