Gustave Flaubert
The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens.
I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.
The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.
It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.
One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.
One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
What an elder sees sitting; the young can't see standing.
Madame Bovary is myself.
The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.Collection: Inspirational
I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.Collection: Morning
Talent is nothing but long patience.Collection: Long
All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.Collection: Long
Only three things are infinite. The sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.Collection: Stars
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!Collection: Gratitude
To be simple is no small matter.Collection: Simple
Earth has its boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.Collection: Stupidity
What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the innerforce of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air--a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible.Collection: Art
I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die. I want you to be amazed by me, and to confess to yourself that you had never even dreamed of such transports.... When you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.Collection: Love
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within itCollection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Art
Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.Collection: Memories
I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.Collection: Believe
Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.Collection: Drinking
He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.Collection: Believe
My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else's - monotonous, sensible, stupid.Collection: Beautiful
Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?Collection: Boredom
I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker's head if they're not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it's bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God's face when it's bitterCollection: Sweet
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.Collection: Sea
The rage for wanting to conclude is one of the most deadly and most fruitless manias to befall humanity. Each religion and each philosophy has pretended to have God to itself, to measure the infinite, and to know the recipe for happiness. What arrogance and what nonsense! I see, to the contrary, that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works have never concluded.Collection: Philosophy
We swung between madness and suicide ... it was beautiful!Collection: Beautiful
How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act.Collection: Way
Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.Collection: Food
But an infinity of passions can be contained in a minute, like a crowd in a tiny space.Collection: Passion
(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.Collection: Dust
Casting aspersions on those we love always does something to loosen our ties. We shouldn't maltreat our idols: the gilt comes off on our hands.Collection: Hands
Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.Collection: Stupid
He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abidesCollection: Dream
There are three thing in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni.Collection: Sea
A man, at least, is free; he can explore every passion, every land, overcome obstacles, taste the most distant pleasures. But a woman is continually thwarted. Inert and pliant at the same time, she must struggle against both the softness of her flesh and subjection to the law. Her will, like the veil tied to her hat by a string, flutters with every breeze; there is always some desire luring her on, some convention holding her back.Collection: Women
It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.Collection: Horse
He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust — dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight.Collection: Sweet
Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.Collection: Block
Talent is long patience.Collection: Patience
You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.Collection: Heart
It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.Collection: Men
As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.Collection: Keys
Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.Collection: Discipline
Axiome: la haine du bourgeois est le commencement de la vertu. Axiom: Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.Collection: Hatred