694 Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides

What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!

But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.

The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

What is beautiful is moral, that is all, and nothing more

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

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.