Gustave Flaubert Quotes about Literature

Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.

Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

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

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

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

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

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

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

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

Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.

Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.

Madame Bovary is myself.

The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.