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

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

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

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 Quote

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

Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

Human speech is a cracked cauldron on which we knock out tunes for dancing bears, when we wish to conjure pity from the stars.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

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 Quote

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

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.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

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

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

Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

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

Madame Bovary is myself.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

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.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

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

One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

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

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

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

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

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.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

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 Quote

The author in his book must be like God in his universe, everywhere present and nowhere visible.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

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 Quote

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

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.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

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 Quote

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote

Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
- Gustave Flaubert Quote