694 Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.

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

He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust — dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

In her enthusiasms she had always looked for something tangible: she had always loved church for its flowers, music for its romantic words, literature for its power to stir the passions and she rebelled before the mysteries of faith just as she grew ever more restive under discipline, which was antipathetic to her nature.

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

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.