Quotes By Gustave Flaubert

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

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 more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

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

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!

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

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

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.