Gustave Flaubert Quotes - Page 4

What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright...Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?

Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom

The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror

What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.

I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.

I have dreamed much and have done very little.

You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.

The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.

Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.

By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

I know nothing more noble than the contemplation of the world.

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 idea and disappears, the more beautiful the work of art.

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.

She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.

Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.

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

There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me

Everything is there: the love of Art.

[The artist] is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.

I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.

Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it.

Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose sombre depths turn us faint. And yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.

Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul’s possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level