Gustave Flaubert quotes:

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

  • 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.

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

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

  • 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 artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

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

  • 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.

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

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

  • Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

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

  • 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.

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

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

  • 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.

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

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

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

  • 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.

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

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

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

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

  • Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • The future is the worst thing about the present.

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

  • For a long time now my heart has had its shutters closed, its steps deserted, formerly a tumultuous hotel, but now empty and echoing like a great empty tomb.

  • 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.

  • She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes.

  • She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.

  • His eagerness had turned into a routine; he embraced her at the same time every day. It was a habit like any other, a favourite pudding after the monotony of dinner.

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

  • Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn't come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words "bliss," "passion," and "rapture" - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books."

  • Charles went to kiss her shoulder.-Leave me alone! she said, you're creasing my dress."

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

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

  • Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose somber depths turn us faint .... Yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.

  • I took Eugene Sue's Arthur from the reading-room. It's indescribable, enough to make you vomit. You have to read this to realize the pitifulness of money, success, and the public. Literature has become consumptive. It spits and slobbers, covers its blisters with salve and sticking-plaster, and has grown bald from too much hair-slicking. It would take Christ of art to cure this leper.

  • Casting aspersions on those we love always does something to loosen our ties. We shouldn't maltreat our idols: the gilt comes off on our hands.

  • I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker's head if they're not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it's bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God's face when it's bitter

  • Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.

  • I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average state is one of being annoyed.

  • You'll always have to deal with bastards, being lied to, deceived, slandered and ridiculed, but that's to be expected and you must thank heaven when you meet the exception.

  • You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything

  • Once one has kissed a cadaver's forehead, there always remains something of it on the lips, an infinite bitterness, an aftertasteof nothingness that nothing can erase.

  • It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.

  • Axiome: la haine du bourgeois est le commencement de la vertu. Axiom: Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.

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

  • DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)

  • I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world

  • Coffee: Induces wit. Good only if it comes through Havre. After a big dinner party it is taken standing up. Take it without sugar - very swank: gives the impression you have lived in the East.

  • Emma was no asleep, she was pretending to be asleep; and, while he was dozing off at her side, she lay awake, dreaming other dreams.

  • Only three things are infinite. The sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.

  • Love, to her, was something hat comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightening - a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping every will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings.

  • Exuberance is better than taste.

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

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

  • Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

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

  • The rage for wanting to conclude is one of the most deadly and most fruitless manias to befall humanity. Each religion and each philosophy has pretended to have God to itself, to measure the infinite, and to know the recipe for happiness. What arrogance and what nonsense! I see, to the contrary, that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works have never concluded.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • The hearts of women are like those little pieces of furniture with secret hiding - places, full of drawers fitted into each other; you go a lot of trouble, break your nails, and in the bottom find some withered flower, a few grains of dust - or emptiness!

  • Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.

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

  • Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.

  • 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.

  • Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.

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

  • A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

  • On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.

  • And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.

  • Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.

  • For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.

  • Read in order to live.

  • Talent is long patience.

  • Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.

  • Talent is nothing but long patience.

  • Talent is a long patience.

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

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

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

  • The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.

  • Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments.

  • What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!

  • 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?

  • [T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and 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.

  • I live absolutely like an oyster.

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

  • I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.

  • DOCTOR. Always preceded by 'The good'. Among men, in familiar conversation, 'Oh! balls, doctor!' Is a wizard when he enjoys your confidence, a jack-ass when you're no longer on terms. All are materialists: 'you can't probe for faith with a scalpel.'

  • A rich woman seems to have all her banknotes about her, guarding her virtue, like a cuirass, in the lining of her corset.

  • One ought to know everything, to write. All of us scribblers are monstrously ignorant. If only we weren't lacking in stamina, what a rich field of ideas and similes we could tap! Books that have been the source of entire literatures, like Homer and Rabelais, contain the sum of all the knowledge of their times. They knew everything, those fellows, and we know nothing.

  • The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror

  • How wonderful to find in living creatures the same substance as those which make up minerals. Nevertheless they felt a sort of humiliation at the idea that their persons contained phosphorous like matches, albumen like white of egg, hydrogen gas like street lamps.

  • The sight of so many ruins destroys any desire to build shanties; all this ancient dust makes one indifferent to fame.

  • Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

  • And she felt as though she had been there, on that bench, for an eternity. For an infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.

  • But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.

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

  • Doesn't it seem to you," asked Madame Bovary, "that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?

  • Ils en conclurent que la syntaxe est une fantaisie et la grammaire une illusion.

  • No se piensa en nada; las horas pasan. Uno se pasea inmovil por paises que cree ver, y su pensamiento, enlazandose a la ficcion, se recrea en los detalles o sigue el hilo de las aventuras. Se identifica con los personajes; parece que somos nosotros mismos los que participamos bajo sus pieles.

  • Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.

  • There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me

  • Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its elect, science now accomplishes for all men.

  • How oft the warmth of the sun aboveMakes a pretty young girl dream of love.

  • It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.

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

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