Gustave Flaubert quotes

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. (Gustave Flaubert)
There is no truth. There is only perception.
Gustave Flaubert
To be stupid and selfish and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.
Gustave Flaubert
Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
Gustave Flaubert
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
Gustave Flaubert
The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.
Gustave Flaubert
The artist must be in his work like God in his Creation, invisible and all-powerful, so that he is felt everywhere but not seen.
Gustave Flaubert
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.
Gustave Flaubert
The man is nothing, the work - all. (December 1875)
Gustave Flaubert
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
Gustave Flaubert
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. (Gustave Flaubert)
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
Gustave Flaubert
You must not think that feeling is everything. . . . Art is nothing without form.
Gustave Flaubert
Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
Gustave Flaubert
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
Gustave Flaubert
One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.
Gustave Flaubert
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
Gustave Flaubert
Read in order to live.
Gustave Flaubert
Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
Gustave Flaubert
One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
Gustave Flaubert
Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough. (Gustave Flaubert)
Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
Gustave Flaubert
Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
Gustave Flaubert
Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.
Gustave Flaubert
Exuberance is better than taste.
Gustave Flaubert