Gustave Flaubert
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.Collection: History
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.Collection: Health
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.Collection: Music
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.Collection: Work
Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.Collection: Love
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.Collection: Communication
A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.Collection: Death
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.Collection: Future
I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.Collection: Alone
Of all lies, art is the least untrue.Collection: Art
Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.Collection: Art
There is no truth. There is only perception.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Work
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.Collection: Happiness
One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.Collection: Brainy
I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.Collection: Inspirational
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.Collection: Poetry
The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.Collection: Diet
Read in order to live.Collection: Education
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.Collection: Poetry
All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.Collection: Poetry
One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.Collection: Happiness
Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.Collection: Success
A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.
Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.
The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.
Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.
Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.
Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.
Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.
What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.
But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands.
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.
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
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.
The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.
I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.
The future is the worst thing about the present.
Read much, but not many books.
Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
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.
Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.
As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.