Gustave Flaubert Quotes about Art

What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.

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.

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.

What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the innerforce of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air--a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible.

I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.

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 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.

Everything is there: the love of Art.

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

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.

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.

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

You don’t make art out of good intentions.

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

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.

There are in me, in literary terms, two distinct characters: one who is taken with roaring, with lyricism, with soaring aloft, with all the sonorities of phrase and summits of thought; and the other who digs and scratches for truth all he can, who is as interested in the little facts as the big ones, who would like to make you feel materially the things he reproduces.

The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.

Art is nothing without form.

The morality of art is in its very beauty.

Reveal art; conceal the artist.

I took Eugene Sue's Arthur from the reading-room. It's indescribable, enough to make you vomit. You have to read this to realize the pitifulness of money, success, and the public. Literature has become consumptive. It spits and slobbers, covers its blisters with salve and sticking-plaster, and has grown bald from too much hair-slicking. It would take Christ of art to cure this leper.

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