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.

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.

The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.

[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.

Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.

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!

All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.

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.

May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!

Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose sombre depths turn us faint. And yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.

That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.

Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.

And indeed, what is better than to sit by one's fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is buring?

[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.

… Her heart remained empty once more, and the procession of days all alike began again. So they were going to follow one another, like this, in line, always identical, innumerable, bringing nothing!

The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.

Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn’t come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words “bliss,” “passion,” and “rapture” - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.

After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again.

The hearts of women are like those little pieces of furniture with secret hiding - places, full of drawers fitted into each other; you go a lot of trouble, break your nails, and in the bottom find some withered flower, a few grains of dust - or emptiness!

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.