Quotes from Gustave Flaubert

Read much, but not many books.

There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries; one crosses them like bridges and keeps going.

That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.

By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.

Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.

I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.

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

What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.

People believe a little too easily that the function of the sun is to help the cabbages along.

...and the country is like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe of silver.

Idols must never be touched: the gilt will come off on our hands.

Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.

Talent is long patience.

Talent is nothing but long patience.

The morality of art is in its very beauty.

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

Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world

The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

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.

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

I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!

Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.