Quotes By Gustave Flaubert

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.