Gustave Flaubert Quotations

Read in order to live.

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

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

Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

There is no truth. There is only perception.

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

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.

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

Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.

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

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.

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

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

One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.

What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.

The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.

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

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.

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.

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

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.

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

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.

I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.

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

The future is the worst thing about the present.

I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.

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.

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.

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

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.

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

You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.

One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.

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

Poetry is as exact a science as geometry

She (Madame Bovary) had that indefinable beauty that comes from happiness, enthusiasm, success - a beauty that is nothing more or less than a harmony of temperament and circumstances

Happy are they who don't doubt themselves and whose pens fly across the page. I myself hesitate, I falter, I become angry and fearful, my drive diminishes as my taste improves, and I brood more over an ill-suited word than I rejoice over a well-proportioned paragraph.

I maintain that ideas are events. It is more difficult to make them interesting, I know, but if you fail the style is at fault.

Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when what we want is to move the stars to pity

. . . human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.

Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. . . I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.

The artist must be in his work like God in his Creation, invisible and all-powerful, so that he is felt everywhere but not seen.

The artist ought no more to appear in his work than God in nature.

Equality is slavery. That is why I love art.

Books are made not like children but like pyramids and they're just as useless! And they stay in the desert! Jackals piss at their foot and the bourgeois climb up on them.

Print: to see one's name in print! - Some people commit a crime for no other reason

You must not think that feeling is everything. . . . Art is nothing without form.

By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming idiotic oneself

By dint of railing at idiots you run the risk of becoming idiotic yourself

I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.

A man, at least, is free; he can explore every passion, every land, overcome obstacles, taste the most distant pleasures. But a woman is continually thwarted. Inert and pliant at the same time, she must struggle against both the softness of her flesh and subjection to the law. Her will, like the veil tied to her hat by a string, flutters with every breeze; there is always some desire luring her on, some convention holding her back.

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

God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world

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 draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.

I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die. I want you to be amazed by me, and to confess to yourself that you had never even dreamed of such transports.... When you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.

Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.

What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.

My kingdom is as wide as the universe and my wants have no limits. I go forward always, freeing spirits and weighing words, without fear, without compassion, without love, without God. I am called science.

One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.

It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return.

Since you are now studying geometry and trigonometry, I will give you a problem. A ship sails the ocean. It left Boston with a cargo of wool. It grosses 200 tons. It is bound for Le Havre. The mainmast is broken, the cabin boy is on deck, there are 12 passengers aboard, the wind is blowing East-North-East, the clock points to a quarter past three in the afternoon. It is the month of May. How old is the captain?

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.

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

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

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

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?

It's a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.