694 Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

Poor human weakness! With your words, your languages, your sounds, you speak and stammer—you define God, the heaven and the earth, chemistry and philosophy, and you cannot express, with your language, all the joy that you derive from a naked woman—or a plum pudding.

You don’t make art out of good intentions.

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?

By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream

Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom

If there is on earth, and among all these things of nothing, a belief worthy of adoration, if there is anything holy, pure and sublime, anything answering that immoderate desire for the infinite and the vague that we call the soul, it is art.

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.

The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.