Quotes from Gustave Flaubert

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

What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love.

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.

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.

There is no truth. There is only perception.

Our ignorance of history makes us libel to our own times. People have always been like this.

Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.

Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.

I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.

Adultery ... could be as banal as marriage.

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.

A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.

One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.

Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.

For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act.

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

Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

In the dark room a cloud of yellow dust flew from beneath the tool like a scatter of sparks from under the hooves of a galloping horse. The twin wheels turned and hummed. Binet was smiling, his chin down, his nostrils distended. He seemed lost in the kind of happiness which, as a rule, accompanies only those mediocre occupations that tickle the intelligence with easy difficulties, and satisfy it with a sense of achievement beyond which there is nothing left for dreams to feed on.

Poetry is as exact a science as geometry

She [Madame Bovary] had that indefinable beauty that comes from happiness, enthusiasm, success—a beauty that is nothing more or less than a harmony of temperament and circumstances.