Gustave Flaubert Quotes - Page 5

One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.

There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries; one crosses them like bridges and keeps going.

Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.

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 than in the unceasing preoccupation of an idea--of an ideal.

How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.

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.

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.

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

Everyone became brave from excess of terror.

I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to live in the bellies of whales, gives up the ghost with a groan and then comes back to life three days later!

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.

As words have an effective power of their own, curses reported against someone might turn against the speaker.

Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.

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

A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.

Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.

Beautiful things spoil nothing.

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.

Melancholy is a sensual pleasure that is deliberately provoked. How many people shut themselves away to make themselves sadder, or to weep beside a stream, or choose a sentimental book! We are constantly building and unbuilding ourselves.

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

Talent is a long patience.

It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.