Gustave Flaubert Quotes

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

Talent is long patience.

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

What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I am essentially a serious person, is that I find myself extremely ridiculous, not in the sense of the small-scale ridiculousness of slap-stick comedy, but rather in the sense of ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life and that manifests itself in the simplest actions and the most extraordinary gestures.

As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.

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

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

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

It is necessary to sleep upon the pillow of doubt.

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.

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

And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

Sometimes I think I'm liquefying like an old Camembert.

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

They took each other's advice, opened one book, went over to another, then did not know what to decide when opinions diverged so widely.

Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.

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

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

Talent is nothing but long patience.

She did not believe that things could remain the same in different places, and since the portion of her life that lay behind her had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be better.

There are in me, in literary terms, two distinct characters: one who is taken with roaring, with lyricism, with soaring aloft, with all the sonorities of phrase and summits of thought; and the other who digs and scratches for truth all he can, who is as interested in the little facts as the big ones, who would like to make you feel materially the things he reproduces.

As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.

Snicker on hearing his name: 'the gentleman who thinks we are descended from the apes.'

May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!

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.

She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.

To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.

The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.

In the dark room a cloud of yellow dust flew from beneath the tool like a scatter of sparks from under the hooves of a galloping horse. The twin wheels turned and hummed. Binet was smiling, his chin down, his nostrils distended. He seemed lost in the kind of happiness which, as a rule, accompanies only those mediocre occupations that tickle the intelligence with easy difficulties, and satisfy it with a sense of achievement beyond which there is nothing left for dreams to feed on.

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

What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.

My God, this novel makes me break out in a cold sweat! Do you know how much I've written in five months, since the end of August? Sixty-five pages! Each paragraph is good in itself and there are some pages that are perfect. I feel certain. But just because of this, it isn't getting on. It's a series of well-turned, ordered paragraphs which do not flow on from each other. I shall have to unscrew them, loosen the joints, as one does with the masts of a ship when one wants the sail to take more wind.

She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.

Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose sombre depths turn us faint. And yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.

Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?

By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.