Gustave Flaubert
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.Collection: Book
The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.Collection: Writing
I know nothing more noble than the contemplation of the world.Collection: Noble
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.Collection: Beautiful
What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright...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?Collection: Book
[The artist] is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.Collection: Inspirational
There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries; one crosses them like bridges and keeps going.Collection: Men
Everything is there: the love of Art.Collection: Art
By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dreamCollection: Dream
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.Collection: Rain
You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
I have dreamed much and have done very little.Collection: Done
COLD. Healthier than heat.Collection: Science
Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it.Collection: Broken
She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.Collection: Paris
Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.Collection: Writing
God is only a word dreamed up to explain the worldCollection: World
I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.Collection: Work
As words have an effective power of their own, curses reported against someone might turn against the speaker.Collection: Might
Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul’s possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common levelCollection: Soul
Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?Collection: Dream
Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.Collection: Patience
For a long time now my heart has had its shutters closed, its steps deserted, formerly a tumultuous hotel, but now empty and echoing like a great empty tomb.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Dark
In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.Collection: Jobs
What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!Collection: Strong
She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.Collection: Book
One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.Collection: Writing
Doesn't it seem to you," asked Madame Bovary, "that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?Collection: Ocean
On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.Collection: Art
Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.Collection: Heart
She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.Collection: Tired
I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.Collection: Aqueducts
Snicker on hearing his name: 'the gentleman who thinks we are descended from the apes.'Collection: Science
And he beholds the moon; like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.Collection: Moon
Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always; and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.Collection: Games
[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.Collection: Stars
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.Collection: Spring
I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the worldCollection: Brother
Sometimes I think I'm liquefying like an old Camembert.Collection: Thinking
Sick, irritated, and the prey to a thousand discomforts, I go on with my labor like a true workingman, who, with sleeves rolled up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, not caring whether it rains or blows, hails or thunders.Collection: Rain
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?Collection: Book