Gustave Flaubert

Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.

The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.

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.

Love, to her, was something hat comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightening - a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping every will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings.

A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.

If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubborness in denying that maxim.

There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me

A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.

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.

By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.

I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to live in the bellies of whales, gives up the ghost with a groan and then comes back to life three days later!

Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it

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.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

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.

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.

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