Quotes from Gustave Flaubert

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature's greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.

But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.

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

She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague "she" of all the poetry books.

She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.

The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.

The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?

He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.

I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times...The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of - I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters - I live and breath with them.

He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex.

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that's what being really human means.

Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.

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

What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I am essentially a serious person, is that I find myself extremely ridiculous, not in the sense of the small-scale ridiculousness of slap-stick comedy, but rather in the sense of ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life and that manifests itself in the simplest actions and the most extraordinary gestures.

She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification — for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery.

Sadness is a vice.

The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything