Gustave Flaubert Quotes

I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.

The morality of art is in its very beauty.

All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.

We think of women at every age: while still children, we fondle with a naïve sensuality the breasts of those grown-up girls kissing us and cuddling us in their arms; at the age of ten, we dream of love; at fifteen, love comes along; at sixty, it is still with us, and if dead men in their tombs have any thought in their heads, it is how to make their way underground to the nearby grave, lift the shroud of the dear departed women, and mingle with her in her sleep

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

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream

Sick, irritated, and the prey to a thousand discomforts, I go on with my labor like a true workingman, who, with sleeves rolled up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, not caring whether it rains or blows, hails or thunders.

Casting aspersions on those we love always does something to loosen our ties. We shouldn't maltreat our idols: the gilt comes off on our hands.

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.

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!

Madame Bovary is myself.

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

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

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

Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul’s possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level

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

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

God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world

Adultery ... could be as banal as marriage.

I have dreamed much and have done very little.

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

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

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.

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.

Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom

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

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.

One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.

A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.

What is glory? It is to have a lot of nonsense talked about you.

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

Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.

The principal thing in this world is to keep one's soul aloft.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.

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.

I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.

The finest works of art are those in which there is the least matter. The closer expression comes to thought, the more the word clings to the idea and disappears, the more beautiful the work of art.

He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust — dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight.

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

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

The great natures which are good, are above everything generous and don't begrudge the giving of themselves.

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

As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.

You'll always have to deal with bastards, being lied to, deceived, slandered and ridiculed, but that's to be expected and you must thank heaven when you meet the exception.

What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright...Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?