Quotes By Gustave Flaubert

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Madame Bovary is myself.

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.

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

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

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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