Gustave Flaubert Quotes - Page 6

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

Put all your rage and madness into your work and live as orderly a life as possible.

Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.

What is glory? It is to have a lot of nonsense talked about you.

What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I am essentially a serious person, is that I find myself extremely ridiculous, not in the sense of the small-scale ridiculousness of slap-stick comedy, but rather in the sense of ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life and that manifests itself in the simplest actions and the most extraordinary gestures.

As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.

A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.

The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.

Axiome: la haine du bourgeois est le commencement de la vertu. Axiom: Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.

You don’t make art out of good intentions.

Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.

The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.

I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.

The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.

Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.

My kingdom is as wide as the universe and my wants have no limits. I go forward always, freeing spirits and weighing words, without fear, without compassion, without love, without God. I am called science.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

It is an excellent habit to look at things as so many symbols.

Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.

I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.

My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else's - monotonous, sensible, stupid.

He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.