694 Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.

I have patience in all things - as far as the antechamber.

Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.

What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.

Beautiful things spoil nothing.

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

What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.