Gustave Flaubert Quotes

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

[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and 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.

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

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal. I've never sought it (though I desire it) and seek it less and less.

Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

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

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

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

For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act.

But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled - inevitably - it's the way with everything human.

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.

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.

There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me

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

It seems to me... that I have always lived! I possess memories that go back to the Pharoahs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practicing different professions... My present personality is the result of my lost [past] personalities.

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

I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all

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

How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act.

Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

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

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.

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

If you knew all the dreams I've dreamed!

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.

We swung between madness and suicide ... it was beautiful!

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.

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

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

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.

What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.

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

The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.

The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.

In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.

And he beholds the moon; like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.

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

I have patience in all things - as far as the antechamber.

Mediocrity cherishes rules; as for me, I hate them; I feel for them and for every restriction, corporation, caste, hierarchy, level, herd, a loathing which fills my soul, and it is in this respect perhaps that I understand martyrdom.

Doesn't it seem to you," asked Madame Bovary, "that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?

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

Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always; and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it; you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective.

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

He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.