Quotes from Gustave Flaubert

The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.

The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.

Non leggete, come fanno i bambini, per divertirvi, o, come fanno gli ambiziosi per istruirvi. No, leggete per vivere.

It seemed to her that certain parts of the world must produce happiness as they produced peculiar plants which will flourish nowhere else.

sorrow rushed into her soul, moaning softly like the winter wind in abandoned manor houses.

There was always an uncertain promise dangling in the future like a golden fruit hanging from some fantastic bough.

You ask me whether the Orient is up to what I imagined it to be. Yes, it is; and more than that, it extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it. I have found, clearly delineated, everything that was hazy in my mind. Facts have taken the place of suppositions - so excellently so that it is often as though I were suddenly coming upon old forgotten dreams.

It is a delicious thing to write, whether well or badly - to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

What vast funds of indifference society possesses

Ah! thought Rodolphe, turning very pale, that was what she came for. At last he said with a calm air— Dear madame, I have not got them. He did not lie. If he had had them, he would, no doubt, have given them, although it is generally disagreeable to do such fine things: a demand for money being, of all the winds that blow upon love, the coldest and most destructive.

The hearts of women are like little pieces of furniture wherein things are secreted, full of drawers fitted into each other; one hurts himself, breaks his nails in opening them, and then finds within only some withered flower, a few grains of dust - or emptiness! And then perhaps he felt afraid of learning too much about the matter.

Les cÅ"urs des femmes sont comme ces petits meubles à secret, pleins de tiroirs emboîtés les uns dans les autres ; on se donne du mal, on se casse les ongles, et on trouve au fond quelque fleur desséchée, des brins de poussière – ou le vide !

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

In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older, he lost his taste for them, but the excellent authors just didn't fill him with the same enthusiasm

His eagerness had turned into a routine; he embraced her at the same time every day. It was a habit like any other, a favourite pudding after the monotony of dinner.

Irony takes nothing away from pathos.

C'était à Mégara, faubourg de Carthage, dans les jardins d'Hamilcar.

It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don't get horny enough to actually to father them.

I believe in Supreme Being, a Creator, whoever he may be, it's of no importance to me, who put us here on earth to do our duty as citizens and fathers; but I don't need to go to church and kiss silver platters and dig into my pocket to fatten up a lot of humbugs who eat better than you or I do! Because he can be worshiped just as well in a wood, a field, or even just gazing at the ethereal vault, like the ancients.

Il faut mettre son cÅ"ur dans l'art, son esprit dans le commun du monde, son corps où il se trouve bien, sa bourse dans sa poche, son espoir nulle part.

I envision a style: a style that would be beautiful, that someone will invent some day, ten years or ten centuries from now, one that would be rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of the sciences, undulant, deep-voiced as a cello, tipped with flame: a style that would pierce your idea like a dagger, and on which your thought would sail easily ahead over a smooth surface, like a skiff before a good tail wind.

But vilifying those we love always alienates us from them to a certain extent. Idols should not be touched: the gilding comes off on the hands.

Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its elect, science now accomplishes for all men.

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.