Gustave Flaubert Quotes - Page 11

We have all been beaten! Each one has to bear his misfortune! Resign yourself!

We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.

La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fe" le o u' nous battons des me lodies a' faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les e toiles. Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.

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

I do not like to "interest" the public with myself.

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

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.

Be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art.

As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.

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 kept for Art, and on the other, my body, which would have to fend for itself.

I live absolutely like an oyster.

When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women

The style, which is something I take to heart, is getting on my nerves horribly. It frustrates and torments me. I have days when Iam sick about it and nights when it gives me a fever. The more I go at it the more I find myself incapable of conveying the Idea.

Books aren't made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids. There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands there in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

Antiquite . en tout ce qui s'y rapporte: Est poncif, embe" tant! etc. Antiquity. And everything to do with it, cliche d and boring.

The citadel of Machaerus rose east of the Dead Sea on a basalt Peak shaped like a cone, girdled by four deep valleys; two about its sides, one in front, and the fourth behind.

There was an air of indifference about them, a calm produced by the gratification of every passion; and through their manners were suave, one could sense beneath them that special brutality which comes from the habit of breaking down half-hearted resistances that keep one fit and tickle one’s vanity—the handling of blooded horses, the pursuit of loose women.

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

One must laugh and weep, love, work, enjoy and suffer, in short vibrate as much as possible in all his being.

After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again.

The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion; emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.

Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.

Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.

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