Gustave Flaubert Quotes
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What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but ...
By Gustave Flaubert
What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the inner force of it...
By Gustave Flaubert
There are in me, in literary terms, two distinct characters: one who is taken with roaring, with lyricism, with soaring aloft, with all the so...
By Gustave Flaubert
The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
By Gustave Flaubert
The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion; emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is somethi...
By Gustave Flaubert
The finest works of art are those in which there is the least matter. The closer expression comes to thought, the more the word clings to the ...
By Gustave Flaubert
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.
By Gustave Flaubert
One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.
By Gustave Flaubert
Once one has kissed a cadaver's forehead, there always remains something of it on the lips, an infinite bitterness, an aftertaste of nothingne...
By Gustave Flaubert
Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
By Gustave Flaubert
I had, as I told you, a great passion while still almost a child. When it was over, I divided myself in two, placing on one side the soul I ke...
By Gustave Flaubert
Each dream finds at last its form; there is a drink for every thirst, and love for every heart. And there is no better way to spend your life ...
By Gustave Flaubert
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 o...
By Gustave Flaubert
Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith—faith and freedom.
By Gustave Flaubert
Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
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.
By Gustave Flaubert
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.
By Gustave Flaubert
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
By Gustave Flaubert
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
By Gustave Flaubert
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
By Gustave Flaubert
The human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out a tune for a dancing bear, when we hope with our music to move the stars.
By Gustave Flaubert
That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.
By Gustave Flaubert
Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.
By Gustave Flaubert
Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.
By Gustave Flaubert