Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

One mustnt ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.

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

The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.

There is no truth. There is only perception.

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

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

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

Read in order to live.

Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.

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.

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

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

All ones inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

The future is the worst thing about the present.

“An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.”

“How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.”

“I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world”

“I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room”