694 Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses; and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

A rich woman seems to have all her banknotes about her, guarding her virtue, like a cuirass, in the lining of her corset.

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

Sometimes I think I'm liquefying like an old Camembert.

Ah! In fact there are two moralities ... The petty one, the conventional one, the one devised by men, that keeps changing and bellows so loudly, making a commotion down here among us, in a perfectly pedestrian way ... But the other one, the eternal one, is all around and above us, like a landscape that surrounds us and the blue sky that gives us light.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

We have all been beaten! Each one has to bear his misfortune! Resign yourself!