Gustave Flaubert Quotes
Most popular Gustave Flaubert Quotes
Exuberance is better than taste.
Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
The man is nothing - his work is everything.
Style is life! It is the very life-blood of thought!
To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.
What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!
No one can ever state the exact measure of his needs, nor his ideas nor his sorrows.
Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
Nothing is more humiliating that to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.
There is nothing so humiliating as to see blockheads secceed in undertakings in which we fail.
An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.
Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling and havoc-wreaking.
The better a work, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linen.
Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.
It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.
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.
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
She snatched off her dress and tore at the thin laces of her corsets, which whistled down over her hips like a slithering adder.
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.
Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.
Sometimes, when I find I haven't written a single sentence after scribbling whole pages, I collapse on my couch and lie there dazed, bogged in a swamp of despair, hating myself and blaming myself for this demented pride that makes me pout after a chimera. A quarter of an hour later, everything has changed; my heart is pounding with joy.
