Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

“Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art”

“There is no truth. There is only perception.”

“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.”

“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.”

“To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.”

“There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it”

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

“Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.”

“Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.”

“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.”

It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it

One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.

But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.

God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world

I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker’s head if they’re not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it’s bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God’s face when it’s bitter

In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is.