Gustave Flaubert Quotes (135 Quotes)

Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.

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

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

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

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

A thing derided is a thing dead a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.

In the dark room a cloud of yellow dust flew from beneath the tool like a scatter of sparks from under the hooves of a galloping horse. The twin wheels turned and hummed. Binet was smiling, his chin down, his nostrils distended. He seemed lost in the kind of happiness which, as a rule, accompanies only those mediocre occupations that tickle the intelligence with easy difficulties, and satisfy it with a sense of achievement beyond which there is nothing left for dreams to feed on.

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.

How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act.

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

There is no truth. There is only perception.

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

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

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

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

. . . human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.

To see one's name in print Some people commit a crime for no other reason.

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

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

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

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

You must not think that feeling is everything. . . . Art is nothing without form.

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

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

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

Happy are they who don't doubt themselves and whose pens fly across the page. I myself hesitate, I falter, I become angry and fearful, my drive diminishes as my taste improves, and I brood more over an ill-suited word than I rejoice over a well-proportion

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.

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.

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.

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

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 artist must be in his work like God in his Creation, invisible and all-powerful, so that he is felt everywhere but not seen.

She (Madame Bovary) had that indefinable beauty that comes from happiness, enthusiasm, success - a beauty that is nothing more or less than a harmony of temperament and circumstances.

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.