All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
– Gustave Flaubert
Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
– Gustave Flaubert
Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
– Gustave Flaubert
As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
– Gustave Flaubert
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
– Gustave Flaubert
Books are made not like children but like pyramids and they're just as useless! And they stay in the desert! Jackals piss at their foot and the bourgeois climb up on them.
– Gustave Flaubert
How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act.
– Gustave Flaubert
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.
– Gustave Flaubert
Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
– Gustave Flaubert
Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
– Gustave Flaubert
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
– Gustave Flaubert
Read much, but not many books.
– Gustave Flaubert
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
– Gustave Flaubert
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.
– Gustave Flaubert
The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
– Gustave Flaubert
The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.
– Gustave Flaubert
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.
– Gustave Flaubert
There is no truth. There is only perception.
– Gustave Flaubert
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
– Gustave Flaubert
What an elder sees sitting; the young can't see standing.
– Gustave Flaubert
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.
– Gustave Flaubert
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.
– Gustave Flaubert
The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.
– Gustave Flaubert
The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
– Gustave Flaubert
The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.
– Gustave Flaubert
The future is the worst thing about the present.
– Gustave Flaubert
The cult of art gives pride one never has too much of it.
– Gustave Flaubert
The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens.
– Gustave Flaubert
Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.
– Gustave Flaubert
Stupidity is something unshakable nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
– Gustave Flaubert
One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
– Gustave Flaubert
One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
– Gustave Flaubert
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.
– Gustave Flaubert
Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
– Gustave Flaubert
Life must be a constant education one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
– Gustave Flaubert
I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.
– Gustave Flaubert
I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
– Gustave Flaubert
I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
– Gustave Flaubert
Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.
– Gustave Flaubert
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.
– Gustave Flaubert
Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness nothing but faith, faith and freedom.
– Gustave Flaubert
A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.