Quotes from Gustave Flaubert

Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.

I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.

What an elder sees sitting; the young can't see standing.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

Put all your rage and madness into your work and live as orderly a life as possible.

Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.

One must laugh and weep, love, work, enjoy and suffer, in short vibrate as much as possible in all his being.

The finest works of art are those in which there is the least matter. The closer expression comes to thought, the more the word clings to the idea and disappears, the more beautiful the work of art.

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

Art is nothing without form.

Reveal art; conceal the artist.

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

The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.

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

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

Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.

Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.

One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.

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.

My kingdom is as wide as the universe and my wants have no limits. I go forward always, freeing spirits and weighing worlds, without fear, without compassion, without love, without God. I am called Science.