Gustave Flaubert's Quotes

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.

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

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

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

Read much, but not many books.

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.

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.

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

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

The future is the worst thing about the present.

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

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

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

What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no truth. There is only perception.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Read in order to live.

Madame Bovary is myself.

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.

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

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

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

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

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

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.