Quotes By Gustave Flaubert

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.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

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.

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

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

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

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.

The future is the worst thing about the present.

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.

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.

What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.

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

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

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

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

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

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.

Read much, but not many books.

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

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

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