Gustave Flaubert

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed at

By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming idiotic oneself

By dint of railing at idiots you run the risk of becoming idiotic yourself

What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.

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.

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

The future is the worst thing about the present.

The cult of art gives pride one never has too much of it.

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

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

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.

Madame Bovary is myself.

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

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

I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.

I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.

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

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.

Here is true immorality ignorance and stupidity the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.

Happiness is a monstrosity Punished are those who seek it.

Exuberance is better than taste.

Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.

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