Quotes from Gustave Flaubert

A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

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

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

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

The writer in his work must be like God in his creation—invisible and all-powerful: he must be everywhere felt, but never seen.

One must not always think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form.

The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

I am Madame Bovary.

Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

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.

A child of my own! Oh, no, no, no! Let my flesh perish with me, and let me not transmit to anyone the boredom and ignominiousness of life.

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

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

Man lives in his dreams, that is where he gets his only reward and receives his only pleasure.

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

Perfection is the enemy of the good.

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

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.

Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.

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